Deep Work

This week I wrote 10 articles and visited Benedict Ambrose in hospital everyday. On Friday evening he told me that the doctors had done all the tests they deemed necessary and wanted to send him home. So I asked a nurse to get me a wheelchair, and after a conversation with a doctor, I took B.A. and all his stuff to the taxi rank.

B.A. was sick on Saturday afternoon, and I stared out the window, collecting my thoughts, before stripping B.A. and the bed, redressing B.A. and the bed, and then doing the laundry. B.A. wasn't sick in that way while in the hospital, so obviously there was something wrong with home. It was a very unwelcome thought. 

After an online consultation with Ma Belle Soeur, I decided what was wrong was the bed: if B.A. lies down all the time, it is very bad for him. However, sitting up in bed is apparently very uncomfortable. A hospital bed costs £4,000, so that's out of the question. A domestic reclining bed, though less expensive, is still expensive--especially as we bought a new bed this year. Thus, tomorrow I will go to a special shop for the elderly and chronically ill for a back rest and see what else they have for sale that might be useful. 

On bus rides to the hospital, I read Cal Newport's Deep Work, and while at home, I put its principles into practise.   Deep Work teaches "knowledge workers" how to concentrate hard enough and long enough to get more work done in a shorter amount of time. Controlling how much time you spend on the internet--and how you spend it--is very important. 

Now every morning, I write down all the tasks I have for the day, and I write a bullet-point plan for how I am going to do them, even outlining how I am going to structure complicated articles. This is very helpful later when I am tired. 

I also identify which tasks are "deep work" tasks--tasks that take a lot of hard thinking--and give myself 90 minutes to do them, as 90 minutes is apparently the maximum time you can really concentrate on an intellectual task. After 90 minutes of hard work, I take a break with some "shallow work", like reading emails or finding stories to write about or even research. Research is easy compared to writing pieces.

Deep work is by definition cognitively challenging, and I've had a lot of practise thanks to (GUESS!) frequent study of Polish. As I may have mentioned before, my memory has improved really a lot, thanks to hours of memorising Polish grammar, vocabulary and occasionally even poems and songs. Even my memory for numbers has improved. I still find writing "hard news" difficult, but I hope that eventually it will become second-nature. 

This week's challenge will be trying to keep up my work output after having returned to being B.A.'s primary caregiver. 

I am very grateful to the nurses and doctors at the hospital for all the tests they did and all the meals they brought B.A., but I am sorry they didn't provide him with very much physiotherapy or exercise. When I visited, I would take him for a short walk down the hallways, getting a little farther each day, but his mobility was clearly much worse than it was before he was admitted. I also read to him from a  children's chess book, as I am rather worried his poor shunted brain is being under stimulated. Learning to play chess will be good for both of us.

Meanwhile, the National Health Service is not the be-all and end-all of care. You really can't rely on doctors and nurses to do everything for your loved one in the UK: you have to do a lot yourself. You really do. Fortunately for "Central Belt" Scots over 65, many (if not all) local governments supply home nursing help. However, those under 65 seem to be out of luck. If you are chronically ill, under 65 and need help taking a bath, it's a good plan to be married to a relatively young and healthy person. 

Meanwhile,  the fund for Joe Baklinski, to which some of you generously donated, has topped the goal. His brother was hoping to raise $25,000 Canadian so that Joe, his wife and their eight children could see the winter out. (Joe's in construction, and in Canada that means you work hard all summer to make up for the lean winter.) Well, it was $26, 000 a few days ago, and I see that now that the goal is $30,000, there's $29, 096. That's very awesome, and I predict a very happy Christmas for all the kids.

B.A. was very pleased and edified that people donated to Joe's fund because he (B.A.) was sick. He said it meant that something good had come out of his illness. Fortunately for us, his employer has a very generous sick-leave provision, so we have a way to go before we have to start worrying about happy Christmases, etc. 

In other news, I saw Cardinal Burke yesterday. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to speak to him, but tomorrow I will write all about the Mass he celebrated in Glasgow. 

The Benedict Option

.....is a fascinating book. I read it in great gulps. There was my life, there on the page! Well, sort of. There was a lot about the Monks of Norcia, some stuff on homeschooling and lots of stuff about the difficulty of getting ahead in academia when you don't toe the party line.

Anyway Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option is DEFINITELY worth a read, and the buzz will continue in the conservative and traditionalist Catholic media for some time. Hopefully the trads will say a lot more than "We've been saying this for twenty years, where has he been, etc, etc., grumble."

No link, for you really should buy it from a Catholic bookshop, not Amazon. That said, I bought mine over Amazon. There is no Catholic bookshop in Edinburgh. Isn't that CRAZY? But we really are a tiny minority here.

Bach and Elizabeth David

Ours is also a first edition but the dust-jacket is gone.

Benedict Ambrose is across from me in a sitting-room chair, reading the London Review of Books. Nulli is on the sofa, programming. Earlier today I prevailed upon the latter to play a lot of Bach on the piano for the entertainment  of the former. (still in bed). Bach is one of B.A.'s favourite composers (if not THE favourite), and he loves live music above most things. Thus, although my judgement is not all that splendid at the moment--I think I am in post-shock shock or something--I am congratulating myself on my cleverness in asking Nulli to come.

Originally I was thinking moral support for me, and then I was thinking a man to help with carting B.A. about, but now I am thinking about live Bach for B.A.

As B.A. seems perfectly alright--save for that small white square on his head---I shall return to Lenten discipline regarding the internet. However, I did want to recommend any of the works of Elizabeth David (but especially French Provincial Cooking) for anyone who expects to spend any time in a hospital or clinic waiting room.

Elizabeth David is wonderfully entertaining and authoritative and--in French Provincial Cooking for example--writing about a France that has largely disappeared but is the France foreigners dream about: a France of farmers, roadside café/petrol stations worthy of Michelin stars, bourgeois Catholic households in Paris obsessed with food (but eating plain boiled fish on Fridays) and catered to by their cook, a hardworking girl up from the country.

If you like food--and I do--reading about amazing French dishes will distract you from the unpleasantnesses of an urban hospital waiting room and also forgive your wandering attention. When you lose your place in "Eggs", you can read a few observations and recipes in "Sweets".

Over 36 hours, I read, I think, all of French Provincial Cooking, first in the Eye Pavilion (between bouts of letter-writing), then in the Royal Infirmary A&E (and very cold it was in there), and then in various rooms in the Western General Hospital. The chapel had a large Bible, thank heaven: if my memory does not betray me, it was the Revised Standard English Version (Anglican).

B.A. was gratified I spent the duration of his operation and regaining consciousness praying in this chapel. He was even quite excited for a moment.

"Do they have the Blessed Sacrament reserved?" he yipped.

"Are you kidding?" I demanded. "This is Edinburgh. We LOST the Reformation, remember?"

Thereupon B.A. lost all interest in this chapel although I must say it will always be special to me. I hope and pray there will always be hospital chapels open for Christians to pray in (with a Bible within easy reach), so this is something to think about in the ongoing war on several fronts against the Christian faith. The chapel had signs posted in both the Christian and Muslim corners of the chapel stating very firmly that the chapel was for use of people of ALL faiths, and I must say I was glad of them.

Peacock Feathers by Temple Bailey

My parents are avid library patrons, which is why their house is not crammed top to bottom with books. Some of the books that do linger on the shelves were owned by my grandparents, and one of them is Peacock Feathers by Temple Bailey (1924). This was one of my favourite books when I was a teenager. It was good to read it again with the eyes of a forty-something.

The story is about a parson's son from western New York state who is led by his adventurous uncle to believe that he will inherit wide estates in Colorado one day. Although he adores his kindly, idealistic and self-sacrificing father, Jerry pines to be more like his uncle. As a teenager, Jerry travels with Uncle Jerry to Washington D.C., where the latter seeks to put together a lucrative deal. When they are eating in the Senators' restaurant, the boy sees a beautiful auburn-haired girl dining with her grandfather. The grandfather, says Uncle Jerry, is a famous senator and the girl is his niece, Mimi Lebrun.

Jerry has fallen instantly in love with the girl, and when his uncle sends him to Yale University, he befriends a young man there who turns out to be Mimi's cousin. Thus Jerry gets swept along into Mimi's High Society orbit, where his simple background puts him at a considerable disadvantage.

Strangely, this is the only book by Temple Bailey I have read. Why I never thought to look her up in a library card catalogue in those far-off days of my youth, I know not. She reminds me of Lucy Maud Montgomery, only there is a beautiful spareness to her writing. With LMM, I find my eye skipping over passages of descriptions; this is never true for Peacock Feathers. Although she too loves landscapes, Bailey gets the greater impact in the fewer words.

I also love the book for its scenes of pre-war America, which is also conjured up for my by E.B. White. It's a reminder that people thought they were on the cutting edge of modernity in 1912. In Peacock Feathers, Christian Jerry rarely mentions Almighty God to his glittering set because they simply wouldn't understand what he was talking about. Having grown up in Canada, I sometimes get the impression that the world before 1968, or 1939 at earliest, doesn't matter to the zeitgeist. It's gone completely down the memory hole; we have entertaining "historical novels" instead.

True, a white American novelist born in 1869 might have a blinkered, limited view of American society. In Peacock Feathers, the only African Americans are female servants and the only American Indians are farmhands and itinerant sellers of blankets. Jerry finds the Italian immigrants who come to farm New York incredibly exotic. However, if your ancestors include pre-war white Americans, stories drawn from their experiences will surely move you.


Immigrant experience is here, of course. Mimi Lebrun and her high society set are from St. Louis, and identify strongly with the French experience in the USA. Their ancestresses came from France with their ballgowns packed up in boxes, and they danced with Lafayette. Their pride, though, rests in their ancestors having been founders of the American republic, founders of cities. They are most definitely "American first" because, although they did not arrive with the Mayflower, they sprang from "first Americans [of the Republic]."

Today this is a decidedly unfashionable point of view, no doubt because the descendants of "first Americans" are vastly outnumbered by the descendants of New Americans who, unsurprisingly, feel disgruntled and marginalized by being left out. This may be why the sins of the "first Americans" are presented to our view today much more often than their virtues. Stuart Little seemed vastly untroubled by inherited guilt, and it wasn't just because he was--incredibly bizarrely--a mouse.

Travel Memories to Cherish

Dawn in the Old City (Stare Miasto)

Having complained at length about my trip trauma, I will now report on some of the happiest aspects. These include Warsaw itself and my weekend with beautiful Polish Pretend Daughter.

When I arrived in Warsaw with the airport bus, it was past midnight, cold and snowing a little. Behind me was the massive Palace of Culture and Science which Varsovians don't like because it reminds them of the Russians, who built it "for" them. I love it, however, as it is such a cool piece of Art Deco. To the right was the 1913 Polonia Palace Hotel, for which I made a beeline.

Warsaw has any number of smart hotels. The most famous is the 1901-built Hotel Bristol, but I wanted the shortest walk possible, so I booked a room and breakfast at the  Polonia Palace through a "top deals" website. This is a very pretty hotel, with a palm court and marble staircases, baroque hallways, ballrooms named after major centres of Polish migration (including Toronto) and spacious, comfortable bedrooms.

I slept very well and appeared at the dining-room door the next morning. My room number was checked against a list, which I found amusing.  A slender young waitress showed me to a small table with views of the snowy streets and asked if I would like coffee or tea. She brought my coffee in a silver jug, and after I had a restorative gulp, I noticed that breakfast was a self-serve, all-you-can-eat affair. I chose a mix of Polish and British+style foods, and, unsurprisingly, the Polish components were better.

As I ate breakfast and made notes in my journal, I looked out the curtained windows at the streets. They were not at all Art Nouveau like the Polonia but definitely 21st century. Snow sleeted down on glum-looking men in winter hats; their shoulders were hunched up against the wind. I reflected that I might be eating breakfast in a hitherto undiscovered dining-room in Toronto's King Edward Hotel, a matter for rejoicing. One of the things I love about Warsaw is that it reminds me of Toronto when I was a child and thought "downtown" exciting and glamorous.

Critics will tell you that Warsaw is a mess of Stalinist architecture and the post-communist building boom, with ever-stranger skyscrapers sprouting here, there and everywhere. I like that about Warsaw. It feels lively and boastful instead of soulless and opportunist, like Toronto's Yonge Street concrete alley stretching from from Sheppard Avenue to Steeles Avenue and (sadly) beyond. Ugh.

So before the Eye Incident, whenever I walked anywhere, I would think "Toronto but better" and feel gleeful. Generally I was walking to a café because the guest refectories of monastic foundations never have proper coffee but coffee-flavoured granules. (Suddenly I had an image of Christ as a guest in a Warsaw monastic foundation, drinking instant coffee all by Himself in the guest refectory.) There were several memorials on the way to multiple massacres of Poles by Germans and Communists, so I had ample reminders to pray for the victims along the way.

Poles are brilliant at typography, book design, poster-making and window-dressing, so the bookstores of Warsaw are irresistible. I didn't mean to buy anything--especially not books because I have a collection of Polish books I haven't even tried to read--but in the end I threw out clothes just to make room in my carry-on for books. Two must-see bookshops are Księgarnia Naukowa im. Bolesława Prusa (Bolesław Prus Scholarly Bookstore) on Ulica (street) Krakowskie Przedmieście Street and Bęc  ("Boing!") at  Ulica Mokotowska, 65.

Bęc is a tiny but glorious architectural bookshop and very hipster. Personally I love all hipster stuff (boo to the haters) except tattoos. Warsaw abounds in hipster joints: coffees with excellent coffee, hamburger joints with craft beer... Hipster Alley is probably Ulica Chmielna and environs. Relax Cafe and Bar is around the corner at Ulica Złota, 8a. Delicious coffee and free wi-fi.

Both the Palace of Culture and Science and Ulica Chmielna have cinemas, and this time instead of attempting the theatre, I went to Polish films. In my two weeks in Poland I saw three films in the theatres and three films over Netflix at Polish Pretend Daughter's House.  The cinema films were Wołyń, Jestem Mordercą (I am the Murderer) and Ostatnia Rodzina (The Last Family).

The first two were terrific, but the last one tested my patience to the utmost. Wołyń is a historical epic about the "ethnic-cleansing" of eastern Poland by Soviets, Nazis and (most viciously) Ukrainian nationalists,  and it is not for the faint of heart.* Jestem Mordercą is half a police procedural and half a morality tale about how good men go bad. Ostatnia Rodzina is not a comedy (as I hoped), but a film spanning almost 40 years (1970s to 2010s) in the life of a painter and his family. The men are awful in their selfish ways, and the Polish Mother (a crucial cultural trope) as long-suffering as usual.

As this is turning into quite a long post, I will save my adventures with Polish Pretend Daughter for later. I will mention, however, that I stayed in her big bedroom and she gave me her bed and slept on a pullout couch. This was very moving, not less so because another young Polish hostess--this one in much more cramped London conditions--also gave up her bed to me. All my Polish friends believe strongly in the proverb "A guest in the home is God in the home." The word "guest" is crucial, however, in a country that has been invaded by foreigners a gazillion times.


*One of the chants at the Independence March was "Bandera was Hitler's whore." I was speaking to someone almost my age last night about Wołyń, and she mentioned that her mother had fled her eastern Polish village with her family one morning and it was burnt down by Ukrainians that night. There is now not a trace of this village. "Not all Ukrainians were like that," she added. The film makes that clear, too.

Fifty Shades of Patricide

This is, actually, the worst (probably teenage) daughter I have read about in my whole entire life. Words fail me. I just can't imagine being in the shoes of anyone who could do that. The only guess I can come up with is that she has been thoroughly coarsened by the pop culture of which FSG is the nadir.

Strict father, my eye. My parents would have had my guts for garters had they caught me reading the 1980s equivalent of FSG, let alone overheard me saying it was my favourite book.

Update: Words have come back. "Honour your father and mother" is the fourth commandment, and it is not conditional. If you have terrible parents, you get to a safe distance as soon as you can, work to forgive them so that your horrible childhood has less of a hold on your soul, and you save them--even if at arm's length--from dying in a bus shelter in their old age, if you can.

Fortunately, most people do not have terrible parents. Most of us have flawed parents, and those flaws are most noticeable when we are shifting from a childhood perception of our parents as all-wise and invincible--that is, when we are teenagers. In theology school, we called such a time "critical distance." In short, we move from a false image of someone to an unhappy new realization and, hopefully, we get through it and come to accept the person for who she or he really is.

Sadly, various forces--most clearly advertisers--take advantage of the teenager's period of "critical distance" to direct a child's natural (and divinely commanded) loyalty to his or her parents to some other authority, like an artist with music to sell. Advertisers preach a gospel of teenage rebellion against parents as if it were a fact, not a construct made up by Hollywood. (When I was a teenager, I was not particularly interested in rebelling against my parents but in the stultifying hypocrisy that seemed to flourish  in the Metropolitan Toronto Separate [i.e. Catholic] School Board. Oh, and also various prevailing ideologies, like multiculuralism vs the centuries-old process of fashioning a uniquely Canadian identity, similar to the process that had developed in Australia. But I digress.) This normalization of "teenage rebellion" makes things all that much easier for people who would seduce children away from their parents--for example, older, wilier, would-be boyfriends. It's almost amusing how teenage girls are so ready to disobey their parents to obey some new near-stranger, thinking that this is all very brave and grown-up and Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet, by the way, is the most misunderstood, and probably the most disastrous, of our culture treasures. To repeat yet again, the point about Romeo and Juliet is that their parents had everything in common and therefore the two principals were perfectly--from a social point of view-- matched, and the tragedy was caused solely because their fathers had a long-standing neighbours row. It is as if, in suburban Cardiff, Mr Jones and Mr Davies couldn't agree who owned the tree along the dividing line between their back gardens, and as a result, young Rhys Jones was not invited to the Davies' snazzy 18th birthday bash for their Carys. The quarrel between Capulet and Montague had absolutely nothing to do with race, ethnic group, social background, religion or even what age it was appropriate for girls to accept suitors. The Capulets were perfectly happy to marry Juliet off before she was 14.

Anyway, I am shivering in horror that things in the West have come to such a pretty pass, and that the attack on the family--which is what the celebration and promotion of "teenage rebellion" comes down to--has been so successful, that a girl in Britain would be psychologically capable of wrongly accusing her father of eight counts of incestuous rape, making up her testimony from a dirty bestseller.

A Curious Find

My visiting mother reads several books a week, so it is a good thing that I have a library card. We fill up at three Edinburgh libraries, but her favourite is Central Library on the George IV Bridge because it has German crime thrillers. They take longer to read than English ones, you see.

One is allowed to have only 12 books checked out, so instead of browsing, I went to the language learning section and had a look at the half-shelf of Polish books.  A hardcover book had fallen behind the poetry volumes, so I fished it out. To my surprise, it was entitled "Homosexuality in the Nineteenth Century."

My first thought was that some disgruntled fellow Christian had hidden it there, so as to protect his (or her) fellow man from something or other. But, on the other hand, perhaps someone had hidden it from other patrons for his own convenient reading later. Later I thought perhaps it was a "drop" for spies, so I flipped through it to see if there were any interesting bits of paper. There were not. That evening I imagined that the book had been hidden by the author of a similar, rival work. And now it occurs to me that a censorious Edinburgh book-hider wouldn't necessarily be a Christian. To judge from the foreign language materials on clearest display, Muslims use the library, too.

After "who" and "why" I pondered "where". Did the book-hider assume that nobody was likely to thumb through the works of Milosz and Szymborska? If so, he or she does not know Edinburgh very well, as the largest migrant group, after the English, are Poles. Or, if the hider was a Pole, perhaps he or she judged that Edinburgh Poles are unlikely to want to read Milosz and Szymborska, having had enough of them at school.

Meanwhile I wondered what I should do with the book, someone else clearly having thought it too dangerous for public consumption. I have highly consistent Catholic friends who will throw books they (and no doubt all popes before John XXIII) consider evil on open fires although open fires are now so rare, such stories about them strain credulity. Possibly they cold-bloodedly set fire to the offending tomes out of doors after borrowing a lighter from an innocent smoker.

However, I really don't see a work on homosexuality in the nineteenth century as being in the pornographic or occult "book of shadows" class so disfavoured by my pyro pals. Moreover, I was given a row by my doting dad when I was 20 just for running off with a pile of student newspapers whose then-current issue featured an image disrespectful (although not actually blasphemous) of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In response to my bragging about this pious deed, he said this guerrilla action had been theft and censorship. "What about the Index?" I demanded, and lo, my father said the Index was wrong and always had been.

Pace patri, I am not so sure the Index was wrong, for books (like television, films and the internet) are powerful and dangerous traps for the unwary and semi-literate, and a little learning is a dang'rous thing, drink deep or taste not the Pyrian spring, etc. However, paternal disapproval drove at least the joy of faith-based vigilantism out of my soul. After checking the book for secret spy notes (which was foolish, for I should have looked for microdots or words in the book underscored meaningfully), I left it on an adjacent empty bottom shelf for the librarian to find.

Update: Here is Alexander Pope's famous poem on the topic of trivial vs deep knowledge. I am not sure what he thinks happens if you "drink deep" though. Surely he doesn't mean you don't attempt the Alpine journey at all?

As it happens, drinking deep--although essential for intellectual honesty, of which humility is the lifeblood--can highly complicate your life. This chap, whose videos I have been watching, is a hyperpolyglot almost entirely obsessed with languages--until recently to the detriment of earning a living.

However, this suggests that he is not particularly interested in himself, and indeed there is something deeply holy about him.Naturally he is interested in how his brain works, but that is not the same thing as self-regard. Curiously, thinking about how your brain works is a form of healthy self-objectivity. As Aquinas says, truth is what is.

The Sublime and the Ridiculous

I have been suffering from a persistent toothache, and to comfort myself for this morning's agonized dash to the dentist's chair, I breakfasted at the café where B.A. and I sometimes have brunch.  I brought with me Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes, my companion when I woke up, in pain, at 3:05 AM.

De Waal is a famous British artist; his trade is in beautiful things. It seems a little unfair that he can write as beautifully as he can cast pots, but as The Hare with Amber Eyes captivated the world of letters in 2010, I was not surprised. Moreover I was shaken, at 3:15 AM, by Yagani Soetsu's suggestion, paraphrased by de Waal, that some objects "express unconscious beauty because they [have] been made in such numbers that the craftsman had been liberated from his ego" (Preface, 3). Could this be applied to writing? Is the secret of de Waal's literary masterpiece a liberation from ego?

When I walked into our brunch café, however, I was thinking only about my toothache--now eased by ibuprofen--and my breakfast. B.A. usually has a "full Scottish", and as I have become a meat-and-eggs devotee, I was looking forward to ordering one myself. I made straight for a table near a window--but not the one in the window, as it could seat six--and was surprised by an obese Englishwoman who greeted me loudly and as if she owned the place. (It turned out that she did .) Startled, I returned the greeting, sat down and examined the menu. When I had ordered my breakfast from the Scottish waiter, I reopened my book.

"One sunny April day I set out to find Charles," writes de Waal.

What beautiful simplicity to that sentence. It frees the author to write a longer second sentence, which he does: "Rue de Monceau is a long Parisian street bisected by the grand boulevard Malesherbes that charges off toward the Boulevard Pereire."

Two verbs make the sentence dynamic, and the conceit that a boulevard "charges off" to another gives the sentence extra force. It itself charges off to the splendidly descriptive third sentence: "It is a hill of golden-stone houses, a series of hotels playing discreetly on neoclassical themes, each a minor Florentine palace with heavily rusticated ground floors and an array of heads, caryatids and cartouches." 

Having set the scene in April, then in a section of Paris, and then on one sloping street, he focuses on a single house: "Number 81 rue de Monceau, the Hotel Ephrussi, where my netsuke start their journey, is near the top of the hill." 

The Hotel Ephrussi has a thrilling neighbour: "I pass the headquarters of Christian Lacroix and then, next door, there it is." Beat. "It is now, rather crushingly, an office for medical insurance."

The paragraph thus ends with a beautifully comic touch that reminds me of Mordechai Richler, in part because de Waal's art-collecting ancestors were Jews, because Canadian Jewish humour is self-depreciatory, and because this is a story about a Jewish family. The Ephrussi family, which originated in Odessa, followed the Rothschilds in setting up branches of themselves in the great capitals of western Europe and becoming as rich as they could. Terrific displays of wealth were a way of asserting their intentions with the unfortunate side-effect of antagonizing their new less-wealthy, non-Jewish, neighbours.

"Well," shouted the owner of the café to her companion, "she's f******g JEW!"

She was talking about a friend who loves Turkey and is always running off to Turkey and managed to do quite well (socially and financially) in Turkey until the friend's son admitted to their Jewishness and then some deal or other, business or social, was doomed. The loud stream of gossip reached me in the rue de Monceau as I waited for my breakfast and became inescapable when my breakfast arrived. Surprisingly, the speaker's companion was male and, if I am not mistaken, a business contact of some kind. Even more surprisingly, for Edinburgh, the speaker spoke with a strong Liverpudlian accent.

My breakfast was a masterpiece of the short order cook's art: soft cooked mushrooms, two halves of a broiled tomato, two sausages, two rashers of back bacon with darkly golden crispy edges, a large spoonful of baked beans, a disk of black pudding, a circlet of haggis. There was no toast, as I had requested, and the dish was not at all greasy. The coffee was black and hot and strong and good.  I put down my book to give breakfast my full attention--or so I thought.

"I told her that if he disappeared, I would hunt her down and kill her," brayed the cook's employer.  As I ate,  I was in some discomfort lest my hostess, as I suppose she must have been, might accuse me of eavesdropping on her conversation with the salesman. Recently I read that the elderly, irascible Graham Greene once denounced a young man in a Capri restaurant for listening to his opinions on Henry James; Greene had apparently noticed the young man had stopped turning the pages of his newspaper and so embarrassed everyone very much by loudly remarking on it. This woman was so loud and so aggressively unselfconscious, she sounded more than capable of such behaviour. Thus, once the immediately danger of staining the book with egg, tomato sauce or bacon fat was past, I took it up again.

But despite de Waal's magic,  I witnessed the end of an altercation between the sitting owner and a standing youngish female employee. I had taken off my glasses to read and so I saw only a slim body and a round, tanned, featureless face. "And by the way you no longer have a job,"  the Liverpudlian was booming.

"I wouldn't work here if you paid me," snapped the girl's Scottish voice, and the slim artistically brown body slid out the door.

"Sorry about that," said the proprietress to the salesman, or whatever he was, and when he was gone, she loudly demanded a phone book so she could call up a locksmith and get the locks changed. "Hello, Local Locksmith," she shouted down the phone.

By the time of this phone call, I had finished my breakfast but had felt the need for a little more coffee. Despite the noisy and shocking manners of three yards from me, Edmund de Waal held me spellbound in Paris. His antecedent Charles, to the disgust of his arch-enemy Edmond de Goncourt, was now having an affair with a married lady named Louise Cahen d'Anvers. They were both passionate connoisseurs of Japanese art.

"Could I please have just a half a cup more of coffee?" I asked the waiter, and the proprietress  motioned him over after he assented.

"Could I please have [whatever it was]," she said in a put-on, mock-posh accent, which I daresay was, despite the cadences, nothing like my own.

"Right away, modom," said the waiter, playing her game.

Okay, class chippiness is something I have come to expect from loud British woman who drop the F-bomb, but this was a woman I could hear from 19th century Paris complaining about competition opening up and down the street! What kind of businesswoman mocks her customers?

Suddenly, I very much regretted my request for extra coffee, and I couldn't wait to leave. Unfortunately, once my coffee arrived, it was some time before I could catch the attention of the waiter again, and by the time I finally did, the owner had loudly engaged the locksmith, loudly informed her other employees how much she distrusted the woman she had just fired, and loudly declared "and I'm taking out a contract on her, and I don't care who knows it."

This, incidentally, was after she had surveyed the two occupied tables and loudly muttered, "Everybody leave now. I want a cigarette."

As soon as I could, I threw down a £10 note and acceded to her wishes. Floreant competitores!

Strange Bedfellows

Once or twice a week I go to the public library with the small knapsack that has replaced the handsome wool-and-leather shoulder bag I gave B.A. and then stole back. (Another lesson of the Chartres Pilgrimage is that carrying a heavy bag over both shoulders is really more comfortable.) After my latest visit, I reflected that the contents of the knapsack reflected the content of my character, as they included:

1. Polish missal, which I forgot to take out on Sunday.

2. Polish dictionary, which I was going to use soon.

3. Polish children's book, which I am reading in depth.

4. Polish notebook, dedicated solely to the aforementioned children's book

5. Gruffalo-themed pencil case with motto "Everyone is afraid of me."

6. The 5:2 Fast Diet Cookbook

7. Delicious Dishes for Diabetics

8. High Heels and a Head Torch: The Essential Guide for Girls who Backpack

9. The Abolition of Britain from Winston Churchill to Princess Diana

10. Success with Languages

11. Teaching and Learning Languages: A Practical Guide to Learning by Doing

12. Survival Handbook in association with the Royal Marines Commandos

13. Wallet

14. Keys

15. MAC "Russian Red" lipstick 

16. Old grocery store receipt

17. Umbrella

18. Water bottle

I felt guilty that there were no novels in this collection. I know I'm supposed to be reading novels. I'm supposed to be saying "Aha! Good opening sentence. Excellent sketch of surroundings. Masterful character development." Etc. 

As you can see, my extramural interests lie with Polish, low-sugar diets, backpacking and life in the UK. I am not actually a diabetic (thank heavens); I've just chosen to eat that way. My daytime slap has been reduced to lipstick because "You look better without [the whole nine yards], darling."  

The library books are currently swearing at each other. The big troublemaker is, of course, Peter Hitchens' The Abolition of Britain, which compares how poor, colourless, clever and morally upstanding the British were in 1965 to how rich, colourful, stupid and base they were in 1997. 

The problem is not so much Hitchens' ideas--some of which are echoed by Theodore Dalrymple in Our Culture, What's Left of It--but the discomfort that lingers in the brain when reading anything else involving his themes. The first chapter, "Born Yesterday", was very entertaining, but I read his second chapter denouncing contemporary teaching methods just after a chapter of Teaching and Learning Languages: A Practical Guide to Learning By Doing. The focus on students rearranging their desks and talking to each other is the sort of thing Hitchens complains about and, as a matter of fact, when I was a child in Canada, basic French was banged into our heads not through teamwork but by group chanting of "Je suis, tu es, il est, elle est, ON est, nouzzzz avons, vouzzzz avez, ils sont, elles sont." Today I long for a mind-numbing, but effective, recording of Polish verbs.  

That I will ever finish  Teaching and Learning Languages is now in doubt. 

In the evenings, when my brain is less suited to philosophy, foreign languages and spleen, I have been turning to the Survival Handbook in Association with the Royal Marines Commandos and  High Heels and a Head Torch: The Essential Guide for Girls who Backpack. These are very different books. 

The first book is brilliant, serious, well-illustrated and full of excellent advice about how to deal with a number of gruesome possibilities. I am working up the courage to read the First Aid section, but meanwhile I have learned how to predict rain. I have also been inspired to assemble a survival tin, even though B.A. says such things as, "We won't need it just for walking in East Lothian." Ho! Confident words for a man who was slowly chased by cattle just the other day.

The second book isn't really about backpacking, it's about BACKPACKING, which is to say travelling  around the world from hostel to hostel in search of thrills, including sex with strangers. Instead of assembling a survival tin, the author of High Heels and a Head Torch stuffed her backpack with condoms. 

The transformation of British sexual morality is another subject at which Peter Hitchens gets all very gloomy. When I finished High Heels and, still sleepless, reached for The Abolition, I stayed my hand. Another dose of Hitchens after Duke's cheerful promiscuity would have been much too depressing. The Royal Marines Commandos are surely not prudes, but they completely neglected the subject of sex in their tome, possibly because in a survival situation you're not supposed to waste your energy on such frivols. (They even advise against over-reliance on rabbit flesh as you would spend too much energy digesting something much too low in fat.) Here is High Heels' top survival advice (besides never taking a taxicab from the airport in Delhi at night):

"I know I keep banging on about this (no pun intended) but it's easy to forget when you're away from home in an exotic location, you've had a couple of drinks, picked up a gorgeous guy, gone for a romantic walk along the beach and are about to get down and dirty in the sand. Pausing the action to ferret around in your bag for a condom may not be your first concern--but it should be. Especially with a partner you don't know. You probably wouldn't trust them with your money, your credit cards or your passport so don't trust them with your health either. The effects of losing that are far more long term  (p. 152, emphasis mine). "

High Heels has a usually enjoyable tone, provides some interesting tips and provokes some giggles, so I am searching around in my mind for kinder adjectives to describe it. Louche, perhaps. It was written for girls travelling after their secondary education (i.e. high school), so the target audience is about 18 years old and--to judge by this book--drugged up to the eyeballs on the Pill. It is curiously classist and racist in that the author assumes that you would put out for a tall blond surfer/fellow backpacker in a heartbeat but not for an Indian rickshaw driver. This is especially interesting when you come across her joke/information that British friends might give the backpacker points for "each different nationality you get through."

Naturally I do not think an 18 year old English girl far from home should put out for an Indian rickshaw driver, either. I am even willing to admit that, for cultural reasons, he may be more dangerous than the Aussie surfer of the author's dreams. I have read rather less about gang-rapes by blond men in Australia than I have of gang-rapes by dark-haired men in India. Still, if you wouldn't trust a man with your money, credit card or passport, I don't know why you would trust him with the tenderest bits of your body. What would the Royal Marines Commandos have to say about it, I wonder. 

The philosophy of High Heels is rather strange from a Catholic, or a Britain-in-1965, point of view, but may explain why so many men in hot, poor countries think white women/British women are barely different from prostitutes. (High Heels has much advice for white girls, especially blondes, to avoid being groped by colourful natives.) It also leads me to suspect that saying, "I'm not comfortable with this conversation; I'm a Catholic" will elicit white hot screams of "Are you judging me?" from your fellow (literally speaking) travellers. 

My advice to Catholic backpackers would be to travel with another Catholic pal or another traditionally religious pal of good will and to seek out backpackers from cultures in which female chastity (at very least) is acknowledged as a sensible (if not desirable) choice. This is just a guess, however, as I never did backpacking of the hostel-jumping sort. In my youth, my few holidays abroad were never longer than two weeks in duration, and I always chose hotels over hostels. I also paid extra for First Class train tickets, thinking this would make me safer as well as more comfortable. This was done at the expense of food--which, by the way,  the Royal Marines Commandos think should be avoided in the first 24 hours of your survival situation. Clean drinking water is more of a priority.

Soumission/Submission

Soumission (in English Submission) is a highly celebrated novel by the French writer Michel Houllebecq. It could be deemed the French 1984, so you really ought to read it.

In short, the year is 2020 and to defeat Marine LePen and her Front National party in the presidential elections, the Socialist Party throws its support behind the French Muslim party. The charismatic "moderate Muslim" Mohammed Ben Abbas becomes the president and all non-Muslim (and women) professors at the Sorbonne are dismissed from their posts, albeit with a darned good pension, thanks to our friends the Saudis.

 Soumission does not condemn Islam or Islamism as much as it tears the skin off contemporary, secularist, left-wing, sex-obsessed French academia. Houllebecq's protagonist François, a strangely sympathetic anti-hero, is a depressed professor of French Literature at the Sorbonne (in his case, Paris III), who feels his best days ended when his seven-year doctoral study of Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans, a 19th century French novelist who converted to Catholicism, was completed.

To his surprise, he was one of the chosen few students given a university post after graduation, but the privilege doesn't prevent the growing banality of his existence. An only child, he hasn't seen either of his divorced parents in years, he has no friends, and and he is obsessed with sex, which he has with a revolving door of young women (usually students) who dump him when they "have met someone else."  He loves to eat,and describes what he eats in loving detail, but it is almost always foreign: microwavable Indian or Arab or Turkish delicacies. It is only when women (and he) are about to be fired from the Sorbonne that he gets a decent French meal, cooked lovingly by a Frenchwoman. The connection between his French hostess losing her academic post and her cooking him splendid French food is not lost on the reader.

The protagonist struggles to find meaning in his life, and even gives Catholicism a go. The Catholic reader, while probably wanting to skip the passages describing his sexual encounters, which are detailed, may be charmed by the good showing French Catholics get in this novel. The Catholic young are described as typically having "open, friendly" faces. Catholic monks are depicted as being young or middle-aged, happy, tranquil, friendly and compassionate. Meanwhile, the protagonist's inability to appreciate monastic life is well in keeping with Catholics know of virtue ethics. Grace is a free gift, and Houllebecq's protagonist has not exactly asked for it or made himself capable of receiving it. (Is Houllebecq a Catholic?  Despite the anatomically detailed sex scenes, this well may be a "Catholic novel.")

Of course, Catholics may be taken aback at how many Catholics, and how many French "nativists" (French who want France to stay French), have converted to Islam in this projected France of 2020. Still, at least Catholics are the one non-Islamic group the Islamists respect, even as they sincerely hope to convert them. (The Jews, of course, know they are toast, so they flee to Israel.)

Bizarrely the Catholic reader may even see the silver lining in the cloud of Islamic domination: women are paid a handsome salary if they leave work and take care of their children instead, small businesses are encouraged and fostered, unemployment for men is at zero, the Muslim president is, and always has been, a fan of Chestertonian Distributivism, the protagonist stops thinking about sex all the time because he never sees naked female legs in public: in the shopping walls  all women are wearing trousers paired with a long tunic. And certainly the Muslim way of life (for a man of privilege and pension) seems better than the protagonist's isolation, drinking, eating microwaved instant Indian dishes, visiting whores....

For there are rewards for high-status Frenchmen (like Paris University intellectuals) who convert, rewards a man obsessed with sex and delighted by home-cooking can appreciate. Will the protagonist succumb to temptation and submit?

One thing to remember about this novel is it is written entirely from the point of view of a selfish man who is unable to love his own mother, let alone anyone else. He is interested in women, but only in how they please or displease him. He is surprised when he discovers that his clever older woman colleague is married, for it blows his mind that anyone could ever have desired her frog-like self, and he misses the presence of women at faculty meetings because he finds men standing around trying to talk about anything that is not football awkward and boring.

Therefore, we do not see--and are not meant to see--what is happening to anyone who is not a prestigious male French scholar in this revolutionary Islamic France. The only Jew in the story has left, all the women seem happy with their new lot, the monks are completely untroubled by the regime change and--bizarrely--once the election is over, there are no insurrections. No rebellions. My goodness. In Krakow, in real life, if a migrant mob said Boo, the local men would pour into the streets with baseball bats--or so a well-educated Krakow native told me in a Krakow business in Krakow.

However, one has to admit that white Frenchmen seem very unlikely to be moved to vigilantism--or to insurrection against a Muslim government--in Paris, where the response to the most outrageous anti-European violence is to lay flowers on the pavement and play "Imagine" on a piano in the street.
Houllebecq anticipated the request in the title and wrote a novel that imagines what France will be like in 2020 if the situation in Europe continues as it does--for the lefty French male scholar, that is. There is absolutely no hint of the sexual violence meted out to women in the so-called Muslim world, which apparently now includes Cologne.

Update: The British Prime Minister tries to get rid of purdah in the UK, hoping that once all Muslim women are freed, they will have the power to combat extremism.