Not too Tired for a Hike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The acoustics are great," Mum enthused.

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

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

Consolations in Unplanned Non-parenthood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Hygge and Happiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

Space and Hedgehogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yay, me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Already and the Not Yet

I have been sitting on the stairs to our new flat. We don't actually own the flat yet. We have had an offer accepted, and a genial bank has given us a mortgage, and there is a "Sorry, Sold" sign on one of the river-facing windows. Our solicitor is working with the seller's solicitor for an earlier move-in date. The seller lives out of town, so this shouldn't be a problem.

All the same, I have been sitting on the stairs to our new flat. It is on the second floor (i.e. on the first floor by European counting) of a two-storey row house built in 1930. It is accessible by a wide concrete staircase, which leads up to a west-facing front door. There are five windows facing west over the gardens (two in the kitchen, one in the bathroom, one over the front door, and one in the front bedroom) and three, I think, facing the river across the street (two in the sitting-room and one I the back bedroom). For some reason, the flat has been demarcated on the west side by a coat of reddish-ochre paint. B.A. likes this and says it is authentic.

This morning's was my third visit to the flat since we bought put in an offer for it. My purpose was to see where in the garden the sun falls in the morning. Yesterday I dropped by to see where the sun fell in the afternoon. The raised beds at the back of the garden, under the apple tree, seem to be always in shade.

Yes, we have (or will have) an apple tree, and the Lady Downstairs told us on our first visit that it gives good eating apples. The Lady Downstairs has a wider strip of garden than we do, but no fruit trees. The departed tenant of our flat used to give her apples, she hinted, and we promised that if our bid was successful, we would keep the apples coming.

The apple tree clinched the deal for me (does anyone ever say 'clinched 'anymore?), to be honest. My first surprise was that the two bedroom flat came with a private garden at all. For over a year, off and on, I have been looking at affordable flats in Edinburgh and environs, and it never dawned on me that one might conceivable come with a private garden. A shared concrete chessboard with laundry lines stretched across it, yes. A sad strip of grass covered in cigarette butts, certainly. But a private garden, no.

For the first time since my Mediaeval Herbal Phase, I have been reading gardening books.

Meanwhile, we are still living in one big room (with ensuite) in the New Town, loaned to us by a generous friend for a peppercorn rent, which goes to her proper tenants, who suddenly found themselves with both housemates and an income-stream. It is a beautifully proportioned room, an excellent shelter after an evening of admiring the architecture of the New Town.

However, the wi-fi connection is weak, which means I go to the Historical House to work, and we are shy of intruding upon the proper tenants in the kitchen, which means either cold food or the microwave. Then there is the problem of two married people who cannot politely get away from each other. B.A. sleeps lightly and late, so in the morning I make a chair out of two pillows on the other side of the closed floor-length drapes and there read five pages of Książe Kaspian.

If we were newlyweds in our twenties this would be sooooooo romantic. Sadly, we aren't.

So while sitting on the steps to our new flat, whose keys we do not yet have, I think about how nice it will be to go indoors and have a kitchen and sitting-room again. The irony, of course, is that the New Town is arguably the best place in all Edinburgh to live, and we will be much older and richer before we even have the opportunity to do so again. I think sadly of the violent assault that befell a young man on our new street, but then there was an actual murder in the New Town a year and a half ago, so You Never Know.

We have a new flat---and we don't have a new flat. It's like the Already and the Not Yet I was told about in theology school. Since the Incarnation, the Kingdom of God is already here. But on the other hand, it's not fully yet here. Since Christ's self-sacrifice, we get to go to heaven. But on the other hand, we haven't got to heaven yet.

So sitting on the steps to the new flat, looking at the garden, is a bit like contemplating the heaven we have been offered but can't get into yet--and might not get into, if we slip up egregiously. Still, we are pretty hopeful we will not slip up that egregiously, and that we will get the keys to both places.

The other thing about looking at the garden is that it reminds me of my childhood garden (or "backyard" as Canadians usually call the land behind a house). This is a little bit sad, for when I sat on the swings in my childhood garden, I wished with all my might to be grown-up and somewhere else---perhaps romantic Britain! And now I am grown-up and in romantic Britain, and I think about the old backyard, and my thirty-something mother climbing up the cellar steps with a basket of wet laundry to hang out.

Oh, aye. How young we all were once--and presumably will be again one day!

Fortune in Misfortune

Last night Benedict Ambrose and I left our post-deluge refuge, a small flat in the Old Town, and rode away in a taxi cab.

It took us about an hour to pack all our things, and I marvelled that in four months so much had floated up from the Historical House to the Historical Flat. Between us we packed seven large shopping bags, two backpacks and one large suitcase with stuff. Down three flights of a narrow turnpike staircase they went, B.A. sighing and groaning as he carried his share. I shifted the pile outside and then by the entrance of a close (alley) while B.A. wrote a thank-you note to the cleaning lady and then fetched the cab.

We and all our stuff just managed to fit into the big black cab, and then we went rattling over the cobblestones of the Royal Mile, bound for the New Town. I said it reminded me of the late 18th century migration of the middle classes from the Old Town to the New. This was a cheering thought in the midst of our no-hard-feelings eviction.

(It's now High Season, and Work needed its "holiday let" flat back, which is perfectly understandable to anyone with a glancing acquaintance with the Edinburgh tourist trade.)

"Fortune in misfortune" is a Polish blessing, and I first heard it in the emergency department of the eye hospital in Warsaw in 2016. Polish Pretend Son subsequently texted it from London, and so I got to read it, one-eyed, too: Szczęście w niesczęściu.  

I thought of that yesterday morning as I first went to the New Town to see my flat-owning friend and her kindly tenants who have allowed B.A. and I to rent the bedroom (with ensuite) my friend had retained for her own occasional use. Yes, B.A.'s brain tumour is back again, and we can't live in the Historical House, and we have to have our stuff out by mid-August, and B.A.'s job has been restructured, but at least we will have a roof over our heads for the summer, and it's in the New Town.

The New Town is to Edinburgh what Forest Hill is to Toronto, Park Avenue is to New York, and Mayfair is to London, so if you are evicted, it's a great place to land. After a coffee, a nice chat, and an inspection of the room, I cheered up very much. Szczęście w niesczęściu, indeed.

When I was 24 and living on cheap hamburger in Toronto's Little Portugal with my best pal Trish, I came up with a comforting theory that as long as someone brought up in a stable middle-class household stayed away from hard drugs (and didn't develop anorexia), she would never be homeless or starve to death. I wasn't sure why that was, but I now that I live in a country with a historic, persistent, obvious and obsessive class system, I know the reason: social capital.

B.A works in the heritage industry and I work for a pro-life media organisation, so we don't earn a lot. This puts us at a slight disadvantage when misfortune comes knocking. However, I was taught  from birth, and B.A. from baptism (long story), an intricate system of social skills that lead to employment in the professions, or marriage to someone in the professions, or at very least friendships with people in the professions. As a result, we are on friendly terms with medical doctors, engineers, hoteliers, lawyers and lots of other practical people who managed to like the study of music, philosophy and literature without being fatally sucked into them, as were we.

It is no exaggeration to say that B.A. is still alive because his brother-in-law is married to a medical doctor. People tell me that my tenacity saved B.A.'s life, and that is probably true, but my sister-in-law's intervention was crucial.* And it is also not an exaggeration to say that we are not incurring the horrible expense usually suffered only by the very poor of living in a motel because we have friends who either live in large houses or own rental property and are willing to let us rent from week to week.

(Why we simply do not take a six-month-lease somewhere in another long story; stay tuned.)

When I woke up in the New Town this morning, I felt terribly smug about the cockroach-like survival skills of the middle classes (provided we stay off hard drugs), and then realised that I was probably thinking more like a Marxist than like a Catholic, so I dropped my smirk and said a prayer of thanksgiving.

*At this point, any reasonable person may reflect that this is very hard cheese on anyone in the UK who does not have a doctor in his family.  Yes, it is.  The National Health Service is touted as a boon to the less-well-off in UK society, and ultimately it is a boon.  But for several reasons, including not enough doctors and nurses to serve multitudes of sick people in an ageing, fattening population, the NHS is neither perfect nor as good as other socialised medical systems.

I do not know why everyone acts as though the only alternative to the NHS is an American-style medical industry. It isn't. I got excellent and affordable emergency care in Poland, and at least one friend got excellent--and free--emergency care in Germany. Socialised medicine can and does work;  the question is how to make it work better for everyone.

Saying Good-bye to the Historical House

Ten days after his cancer diagnosis, Benedict Ambrose returned to the Historical Refuge from work to tell me that we will never again reside in the Historical House.

I had made a bolognese sauce, and this is an important point, for usually B.A. makes supper. However, it was Victoria Day in Canada, so I had the day off and (for once) thought it only fair that I should do the cooking.  Thank heavens.  If poor B.A. had had to come home with that news and then  shove a fish under the grill,  he may have burst into tears.

Fortunately, I am a good woman in a crisis. Although I am often overcome by the slings and arrows of daily existence, life-changing news leaves me cool, calm, and collected. I do not know why.

As it happened, I had had a chat with the housekeeper that morning, learned that there was an outside chance we wouldn't be back until Christmas (if ever), and then I resumed looking at properties on rightmove.co.uk.

So I told B.A. that I was sorry, boiled up some spaghetti noodles, served up dinner and watched The Good Place (without irony) for an hour. We said the rosary, and then B.A. went sadly to sleep and I went back to rightmove.co.uk.

The next day I threw a fit, but I was serene on the bad day itself, so that is something.

Historically the Lady of the Historical House moves on either because she has died or because her husband has. It will be so much more cheerful packing up our belongings with B.A. than it would have been had he died last year. If he hadn't gone to an eye specialist, B.A. probably would not have survived March. He would have gone to sleep, and that would have been that, and the postmortem would have been quite a shock to B.A.'s mum and little me.

Seen from that perspective, having to move out of the Historical House is not really that much of a big deal, even if it was built in the 17th century (with 18th century additions) and it has been our home for nine years.

I would rather keep Benedict Ambrose than the Historical House, and that's a fact.

In some ways, the Historical House was a very inconvenient place in which to live. The ceilings are oppressively low, and we could stand it only because we are rather short. The stairwells on either side are open to the rest of the staff, any workmen who come in and, technically, tourists although I never caught a tourist daring to ascend. The washing-machine had to be kept in the old Servants' Hall, which is in the cellar, so doing laundry meant long trudges to and from the attic.

The fire alarms sometimes went off for no reason in the middle of the night, often when we had guests. It was B.A.'s job to get out of bed, let in the fire brigade and turn off the alarms. When he was in hospital, that was my job, and the alarms "went into fault" THREE TIMES while B.A. was at his sickest.

Naturally we could neither paint nor plaster nor paper, and our searchings of conscience before hammering nails anywhere verged on the Jansenist. Meanwhile, in summer we had to keep an eye out for people setting fires in the fields, and in September we had to discourage conker-thieves from damaging the horse chestnut trees near the House, and year round we were woken by noisy dogs.

On the plus side, the Historical House was a joy to come home to, especially when the cherry tree was in blossom, and we had lots of space for guests. It may be a long time before we can have so many rooms again: a proper dining-room/guest bedroom, a proper guest bedroom, an office/guest bedroom, a library/guest bedroom. We could put up four guests at a time and sometimes did.

We also had a lot of dinner parties and hosted Sunday Lunches, both in the dining-room and, on warm and sunny days, on the front lawn. In latter years when Polish guests were in the house, I took to hanging a Polish flag from the balustrade for our outdoor parties. Apparently this--and our clothing--led to us all being mistaken for World War II re-enactors.

Our last dinner party, which featured Polish Pretend Son and his Fiancee, ended two days before the fatal pipe blew, flooding the bathroom and driving us from our home. Dear me. Come to think of it, this is the end of PPS's most stable Edinburgh home, too. Well, I always promised him a home he could smoke in.

The views, too. I will most definitely miss the views: the Firth of Forth from our kitchen window and Arthur's Seat from the dining-room. Fortunately, a day never went by when I didn't look out the kitchen window and marvel. Strangely, weeks went by without me going for any but the most cursory walk through the woods, and very rarely did I feel like tramping through the fields. I preferred to enjoy the great outdoors from the low-ceilinged inside.

What makes a house a home, I asked myself the other day, when I had made a short visit to the HH for fresh clothing. It isn't a matter of having one's stuff around, I decided. What makes a house a home are the memories it conjures up: memories of happy events like parties and of sad adventures like B.A.'s illness. We have lots of memories from the past nine-and-a-half years, and presumably when we pack up our stuff, we'll pack up the memories, too.

(In case you are wondering,  at the moment my most vivid memory of that House was getting B.A. out of the bathtub last autumn when he was suddenly too weak to stand on his own. I am sorry if that seems rather dark and brutal, but it is what it is. Life is tough, and at least B.A. survived in the end.  The only way I could get him out that day was to get into the bathtub myself behind him and pull him up. It was so incredibly dangerous for both of us, I don't understand why I didn't call an ambulance instead. At any rate, should you ever be in the same situation, don't do what I did. Call for paramedics because you might not be so lucky.)

Nine Years of Beraphic

Beraphic, in case you are wondering, is a relationship name, composed according to television fans' relatively recent "shipping" conventions. Since Benedict Ambrose and I took refuge in a holiday flat with Netflix, I have become hip to the kids and all their crazy entertainment crazes. Currently it is making portmanteaux of fictional characters' names in homage to their romances, e.g. "Riverdale's" Jughead + Betty= Bughead.

I remember "shipping" Mulder and Scully from "The X-Files" decades ago, but nobody called them Sculder or even Mully, thank heavens. However, I seem to recall the names of canoodling film stars being squished together in this way, like Bennifer and Tomkat. Ick to Tomkat.

Anyway, it is Beraphic's ninth wedding anniversary, so feel free to send us pottery, if you like. We have just returned from a boozy lunch, so B.A. is taking a nice nap and I am sobering up with coffee before delving once more into the latest correspondence from the front-lines of the war against the Culture of Death.

This morning we went together to my weekly Polish tutorial for a fun activity called "translate for B.A." Language tasks are not immediately transferable, so if you expect to speak a foreign language abroad when travelling with a monolingual spouse, you must practise thinking in the foreign language while your spouse is interrupting you monolinguistically.

We told my young Polish tutor that today was our anniversary, and she was quite interested in the longevity of our marriage and wanted to know our recipe for success. B.A. said it is going along to Polish lessons to make sure the Polish tutor really is a woman, and now that he has seen her three times, he is sure she is a woman and he doesn't have to come anymore. Ha ha ha.

I had to translate that all into Polish, by the way.

Then B.A. got  philosophical and said that the recipe for a successful marriage was five parts patience mixed with a sense of humour about oneself and one's spouse. Also, shared first principles. And also love because without love it's nothing, which is easier to say in Polish than "five parts patience."

At a certain point I just free-styled and explained in what seemed to be recognisably Polish that unlike most of our generation in either Canada or Scotland, we are both fervent Catholics, which was our shared first principle. It would have taken a lot more vocabulary to theorise that anyone whose first principle is vegetarianism should marry a vegetarian, or anyone who is a fanatical nationalist ought to marry someone from his or her nation.

Catholicism in itself is more consciously pro-marriage than, say, vegetarianism or nationalism, but I remember being confronted with a classroom of little Catholic girls all deeply anxious to know how one goes about getting an annulment. That said, Catholicism smiles upon those things that help sustain a marriage--like patience, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice--and frowns upon those things that stick pins in it, like resentment, spendthrift, and infidelity. I'm not sure vegetarianism is that conscious of relationship-building, and nationalism could theoretically lead a woman to leave her alpha male husband for an alpha-plus national chieftain, or a man to leave his ageing wife for a fertile young thing, all for the sake of the Fatherland.

But in general I am all for people figuring out their own first principles and choosing their spouses  accordingly.

Less edifying factors that lead to long marriages include financial interdependence, with certain ruin to both, should one spouse desert the other; family pressure, with the likely disapproval of many suddenly scary family members, should one spouse desert the other; and a fair amount of unpleasantness in the world outside the home, so that home is a real refuge, no matter who else is living in it. For example, I might be flakey and crabby and prone to singing the same Polish pop song over and over again, but I am still more soothing to the nerves than, say, a Scottish vs English punch-up in the Historical House car park.

Against Anti-NHS Hysteria

I covered the Alfie Evans story for weeks, and I was very disturbed by his death. However, the same system saved my 45 year old husband's life. 

I believe we need to do more to protect the lives of the very young, the very old, and the very disabled. However, the doctors, nurses and other medical staff of the NHS save lives of adults and children every day.

It is  too bad I had to fight so long and so hard to get Benedict Ambrose the medical care he obviously needed, again and again. However, it is a miracle that his chief surgeon was a specialist in paediatric surgery: B.A.'s tumour, though rare, was less rare in children. It is very fortunate we live in Edinburgh and had access to this expert. 

Unlike Alfie, B.A. received excellent care from both an NHS neuroscience department and an NHS intensive care unit. This is not to say there were no mistakes. There were mistakes. No doctor was infallible, and not all nurses kept all the details straight. However, the combined efforts of many NHS-employed professionals saved B.A.'s life. His full recovery, deemed "miraculous" by his surgeon, I attribute to God's mercy. 

Like Alfie, B.A. was on a ventilator (briefly), artificial hydration, and artificial nutrition. But I never had to walk in Tom Evans' shoes. 

As someone who grew up in a system of "socialised medicine", I think the NHS could learn from other such systems. For example, my experience of medical care in Toronto is that it is much more family-centered and much more respectful of patients' religious beliefs. I believe that it is also more accommodating and knowledgable about ethical forms of fertility care, for example. 

Other systems of "socialised medicine", as in Poland, Germany, Italy, may be much more aware that human life has a value quite apart from the "quality" a middle-aged, well-paid professional in robust health might think it should have. 

But that said, both my husband and several of our friends have received satisfactory care from our local NHS.

The only thing left to say is that I know how loveable a family member is even when--or especially--he has serious cognitive impairment. I missed the "old" B.A. while he was gone, but I loved funny, cranky, "sliding-into-a-coma" B.A., too. As permanently brain-damaged as he was, Alfie gave joy to his parents, and as brain-damaged as B.A. temporarily was, he gave joy to me. 

Benedict Ambrose Well Enough to Come Home

Just a quick post of thanksgiving to God and everyone who prayed,  emailed, sent a card or gift, made a donation to the Baklinski fund (which made B.A. feel useful), sponsored a Mass, brought my husband's case to the attention of nuns...  Thank you all very, very much.

Today the surgeon called me to say that B.A. can come home tomorrow. Mr S is very pleased--and surprised--by B.A.'s rapid progress. I never really know how to express this with exact doctrinal correctness (given than God is both immutable and apparently moved by prayers), but I am putting B.A.'s recovery down to God's will, helped along/participated in by everyone who prayed for B.A. and me.

So again thank you!

P.S. Apologies for not answering all the emails. I DID read them, and I was grateful for them, but I didn't always have time to respond. I hope you understand.

Tired

If I could, I would spend every moment at the hospital. Leaving is just so awful, especially now that B.A. is more or less in his right mind. He's still confused, though, and he looks so sad--not that I am leaving, but that something awful has happened that he can't quite comprehend.

We should be rejoicing, but B.A. has been traumatised. After all, he literally (if skilfully and kindly) had his skull split open. And I feel figuratively traumatised, which is nowhere near as serious, but still tiring. I'm not sure how much B.A. understood when he signed the consent forms, but I understood them all. I have lost count of the times I have watched my husband sign off on death this year. Five?

My big fear now is that I will fall down the stairs or in front of a bus. If that happens, who will make sure B.A. is okay?

In the ICU

Man (several uncomfortable tubes inserted in his body): I'm sorry, darling.

Woman: Why are you sorry, darling?

Man: I'm sorry that you're suffering.

Darkness and Stefan

This morning I woke up at 5 AM, following a bad dream about Pope Francis. I searched my mind for compelling reasons to get up, and I didn't find any, so I stayed put until 7:30 AM.

Staying in bed until 7:30 is not really a good idea because I don't have a lot of time for goofing off. My husband is in a hospital clear across town, and travel time is, there and back, about three hours. I visit him for two hours every day. By the time I get home, I am very tired. Therefore, my best writing time is, as usual, first thing in the morning.

Usually I visit B.A. after 6:30 PM, but I hate walking through the woods to an empty house after dark, so this week I went to the earlier visiting session. I felt guilty and cowardly about being so scared of the woods until B.A. got moved to Stefan's room.

I first saw Stefan (not his real name) a couple of weeks ago. He was an arresting sight as he walked down the hall, even for the Neuro ward. He had two black eyes and a bloody broken nose, and I'd never seen anyone who looked that bad on his own two feet. I thought he must be a car crash victim.

When B.A. got moved to Stefan's room a week or so later, I quickly glanced at the whiteboard over Stefan's battered head and ascertained that he was a Pole. This was unusual for the ward, actually, which is full of Scots patients. The nurses are a little less homogenous, and the doctors are definitely a mix of nationalities, but so far all patients I've seen, except Stefan, have been Scots.

One thing I noticed about Stefan, besides his shaved head, black eyes, broken nose and Polish name, was that nobody ever came to visit him. I felt badly about that and considered going over and trying to have a conversation, but I felt rather shy. Speaking Polish when you're not Polish and, incidentally, living in Scotland is a bit like being a giraffe with five legs--or, worse, Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles.

So when Polish Pretend Daughter appeared one day last week to go home with me after the late visiting hour, I sent her to speak to Stefan, who had gone to the TV room, possibly to escape the sight and sound of poor B.A. throwing up. When I fetched PPD, Stefan was smiling cheerfully, and PPD held the answer to the mystery of what had happened to Stefan.

In short Stefan, who lives in Fife, was walking home alone one Saturday night after drinking, and he was attacked by a group of men who had also been drinking. They kicked his head in, and Stefan ended up in the Neuro ward.

PPD did not ask if men were Poles or Scots. This  would make a difference to the headlines, if not to poor battered Stefan. If the men were also Poles, there would be no real news story. If the men were Scots, however, there might be a "hate crime" angle, which would be very interesting to the newspapers indeed. I have tried to find a report about it online, without success. Any number of men get their heads kicked in on Saturday nights in Fife.

At any rate, I no longer felt quite so badly about going to the hospital during "work hours" because Stefan's bruises and stitches were a daily reminder that Central Belt Scotland is a dangerous place for those who walk alone at night.

I have been feeling incredibly stressed out from trying to do my job adequately between daily trips to the hospital. This morning I made myself phone up an interview subject in Poland, but I forgot to  check the information I received that he was fluent in English. When the subject indicated that he would rather I interviewed him in Polish, six years of memory work simply vanished from my head. Reduced to a gibbering wreck, I took down the subject's email address. It was only after I hung up that I realised that

A) I had never before spoken Polish on the phone and
B) the subject may be "fluent" but some of my fluent-in-English friends absolutely hate speaking English on the phone.

If I still had any kind of ego around my language-learning skills, it would have been thoroughly bruised. However, I know using the telephone in a foreign language is a massive challenge for most language-learners. And three hours later I managed to cover myself in glory at the hospital when a nurse gave up trying to explain to Stefan that he couldn't have all his stuff back.

"The police need it for evidence," the nurse had been saying from behind a curtain. B.A., who has hearing like a bat, had motioned for me to be quiet and was listening intently to the drama. When the nurse hurried past us, muttering that she couldn't speak Polish, B.A. volunteered that I could.

She was very glad to hear it.

So off I went behind the curtain to introduce myself formally to Stefan and explain to him that he couldn't take all his stuff because the police needed it. Stefan said he understood, and off I went back to my habitual seat beside B.A.'s bed to ponder what "evidence" was in Polish (świadczenie, among other words). And I was highly gratified when Stefan, stymied by the more thickly Scottish accent of the next nurse, came in search of me to translate again.

Fortunately for him, I was just a stop gap. There is at least one Polish nurse at the hospital, and she appeared twice, first to convince Stefan that it was time to go home and then to take him out to a cab. The gentle patter behind the curtain, was quite a contrast to my lurching, tortured explanations all in the super-correct Second Person Formal. ("Sir cannot have Sir's things because the police need Sir's things for the court.")

Benedict Ambrose will be in hospital for at least another six weeks,

*I wonder if there are Anglo-Saxon analogues to Long Duk Dong in foreign films.

Pilgrimage to Ven. Margaret Sinclair

My husband has been praying for the intercession of Edinburgh's 20th century saint, the Venerable Margaret Sinclair, for the miraculous disappearance of his tumour.

As you can see from her honorific,  Margaret is only on the second rung of the ladder to full-fledged canonisation. If she is indeed in heaven, and she wants her admirers in Scotland and abroad to know it, then here is an opportunity for her to "do a miracle" in the good old-fashioned way.

To participate more fully in Benedict Ambrose's petition, I am going to go on a walking pilgrimage from our house to Venerable Margaret's shrine at St. Patrick's Church in the Cowgate, which is about a five mile distance. When I get there, I'll go to confession, if I'm there in time for confession.  My friend and I will leave here at 9:30 AM BST, so if you're awake, please pray for us and, especially, for my husband.

Here is an account of the life of Venerable Margaret Sinclair--and a miracle she may have already worked.

(To the non-Catholic reader: we don't believe that saints themselves do miracles. Rather, we petition saints to intercede for us with God, in the same way you might have asked the baby of the family to ask your parents for some particular treat. Naturally it is God who grants the favour, thanks to the intercession of the saint. Suddenly I remember--once again--that time I was naughty at nursery school and the teachers took my cookies away. Seeing I had no cookies, my little brother shared his with me, Yes, I remember.)

Meanwhile, PPS has convinced that Beautiful Young Lady to marry him. I'm so glad she said yes (or, presumably, tak), not only because PPS seems rather fond of her---and I like her---but because he bought the ring before he asked. 

Good Nurses

I like the nurses at the hospital. They are professional, attentive and take the obstreperousness of the bantering men in their stride. They bring my husband three meals a day and note down how much he eats. They weigh him. They check his blood pressure several times a day and write that down. They remind him to drink more water.  They remind him that if he doesn't drink, he'll  have to have the fluid tube, and if he doesn't eat, there's a tube for that, too, and it isn't very nice. They also check him for bedsores.

B.A. does what the nurses tell them.

Respect.

The physio hasn't been by, but B.A. had a second operation this week, so physio has been abandoned for now. I don't even ask about that. I just turn up every day, sit by B.A.'s bed, observe the latest embroidery on his scalp,and which tubes are in or out, watch the nurses, relate the news.

The latest London Tube bombing was a "good news" story, believe it or not, as the bomb didn't go off properly and "just" singed a few people.

My visits are a ward fixture. I'm on first name basis with all the men who were in the room when B.A. was settled into it, and if he's stays, I'll be on first name basis with the young man who came in the day before yesterday. I provide a little supplementary nursing, too, just because I'm there. The other day, I handed a cardboard "bucket" to another man on the ward to throw up in.

Meanwhile Polish Pretend Daughter and her husband have come to stay with me.

This is, of course, only a very brief sketch.

A Much Better Day

Since I have harrowed up your souls with this morning's post,  I must in justice tell you that B.A. is doing so much better now that he has been operated on. He is so much more like his old self.

When I turned up today, I found out that he has got a proper physiotherapist at last. She taught him how to use a contraption he refuses to call a Zimmer frame, and he pushed it down the hall to the Patient Waiting Room where we had a good chat. He is very cheerful and getting along well with his three roommates. They all banter madly together and with the nurses in that inimitable Scottish way.

There is also a chart at the end of his bed monitoring how much food he has eaten. Also, I am delighted to say, he ate three square meals today. My goal now is to make sure he stays in the hospital long enough to gain weight and be able to walk without a prop.

But I am utterly exhausted, so that's it from me for now. When I was on my way for a sandwich from the nearby Waitrose between the two "visiting hours" periods, I got completely lost and spent my whole "dinner hour" taking buses back to the hospital.  I'm chalking that up as one more symptom of "tired brain."

Update (Wednesday): AND I forgot a bag of laundry on one of the busses on  the way home. However, I found it today at the Lost Articles office, so now the clothes are washed and drying on the line.

Astonishing Recollection of a Terrible Week

One day I will return to these posts about my husband's illness and be simply astounded that we went through all this. That's the hope anyway. Occasionally I wonder what I would have done had we had children, but that's simple: they would have been packed off to Canada months ago. It would have been very good for their French, and I suspect my brother would have signed them up at once for karate.

Last week was one of new horrors, and I was furious with myself for having cravenly whisked Benedict Ambrose away from the hospital when he could have been there at least an extra day and  seen a dietician. That said, his mobility was deteriorating there. I didn't cajole him outside for a walk for a few days--the trip home was exhausting enough, and the next day he threw up--but when I did get him outside, he could manage only one circuit of the front quadrangle. He didn't get physiotherapy at the hospital; clearly the physiotherapist saw him only to tick the boxes that said he legally could be sent home. 

Both the hospitals we frequent in Edinburgh have big posters insisting that patients should change out of their nightwear and to get out of bed and walk. A week in bed ages the muscles by ten years, claim the posters. Thus I made myself argue with B.A. to get him out of bed, to put his slippers on, to go outside, to walk the circuit, to walk the next circuit. 

"I can't," said B.A. 

"You CAN," I said. 

But the story doesn't end with B.A. doing a ten mile race alongside cheering crowds. No. Not so far anyway. What happened were two terrible falls, a call to the local surgery, being snapped at by the duty doctor, two paramedics and an ambulance. Because it was true. He couldn't, and he can't. 

That was Wednesday and Thursday. On Tuesday night, I decided to sleep in the guest room across from the bathroom, so I didn't keep B.A. awake, and he wouldn't wake me up with all his frequent wakings and muttered complaints. At 1 AM, I was awoken anyway by the sound of B.A. going to the loo.  I got up, opened my door and saw him weaving in the bathroom doorway.

"Alright?" I asked.

"I'm alright, darling," said B.A. or something like that. I was back in bed before I wondered if I should have taken B.A.'s arm and escorted him back to bed and then---CRASH!

I was out of bed in a shot, and poor B.A. was on the floor moaning "My neck, my neck." And because I had absolutely no idea what to do and because my experience of the NHS is people doing as little as possible, I didn't call an ambulance. I know now that if someone falls and says "My neck hurts," you call an ambulance.

Fortunately, B.A. had not broken his neck, and wasn't concussed (which was all I could think of; neck-breaking never occurred to me), and so I led him back to bed and got in with him, intending to wake him up every hour like the woman on the phone said to do the first time he fell and hit his poor head, months ago.  Instead I slept like the dead. 

B.A. fell again that evening sometime between 6 PM and 7 PM, and that was my lowest moment ever. I had worked all day* on my journalism and reluctantly got up to A) make dinner and B) take B.A. out for some exercise. 

B.A., as usual, complained and told me he couldn't do it and he was tired, etc. I begged him, ordered him, reminded him of the posters, told him his not being able to walk was because he had chosen to lie in bed all day, and shouted before stomping off to make dinner. Not very nice.  And when I returned, B.A. slowly got out of bed, almost stood, and then crashed to the floor, hitting his head on the wall, and then on the floor, grazing his forehead and his nose. 

And I collapsed on the floor myself, wailing and then banging the floor with my fists and screaming  "I don't know what to do. I simply don't know what to do. And I am all alone. There's nobody else. And I am simply not qualified. I have no idea what to do."

Poor B.A. was very dazed. I think I must have helped him into a chair. Blood was seeping from the grazes. 

"The room is spinning around," he said. 

Once again, I should have called the bloody ambulance. However, I had no idea this was "important" enough to call an ambulance. Because, you know, 999 is so sacred compared to the NHS 24 hotline, and I have called NHS 24 so many times already, and a lady on the phone saying "And can I speak to your husband?" wasn't going to get his grazes attended to. So instead of calling 999, I ran about the flat trying to find antiseptic wipes. We were completely out of antiseptic wipes. 

In the end I called my kindly neighbour, and she and her husband came over with antiseptic wipes. At that moment, my sister-in-law, the doctor, phoned, and we had a long talk in the bathroom about how important it was that B.A. see his neurosurgeon. Ma Belle Soeur was really worried that B.A. had been released from hospital without seeing his, or any, neurosurgeon. She was adamant that he must. I said I would call the neurosurgeon's office in the morning. 

The night passed without incident. And in the morning I called the neurosurgeon's secretary's answering machine twice, and went to see my Italian tutor because A) I hadn't had time to email him and cancel and B) I know firsthand how awful it is to lose an hour's teaching wages. And it was very therapeutic to tell my Italian tutor, in Italian, everything that had been going on and then to think of something else, i.e. what are the most frequent grammatical mistakes made by anglophones learning Italian, for half an hour. 

Upon returning home, I called the local medical centre and asked to speak to the duty doctor. The duty doctor called me back, and after I listed off a catalogue of woes, he ripped into me.  Apparently I had called the emergency line THREE TIMES [in history] and ALWAYS ON A THURSDAY.  He had told me the LAST TIME that I should call FIRST THING in the morning because my calling at noon messed up the schedule and if he sent out a doctor to me that would really inconvenience the people in the waiting room, etc., etc. 

I was utterly dumbfounded. And when a doctor arrived, questioned B.A., said he might have a broken   neck and called an ambulance, I thought about that awful duty doctor and wondered how he would feel if B.A. did have a broken neck.  

As directed, I held B.A.'s head straight, and when the phone rang, the doctor answered it. It was Mister [X], the neurosurgeon.  I held B.A.'s head straight with one hand while holding the phone with my other and being simultaneously grateful and impressed that the neurosurgeon had actually called me because, at this point, it was better than--and just as surprising as--Pope Benedict calling. 

Two massive paramedics appeared in the tiny guest room, and there was some discussion about how to get B.A. and his new neck-brace down 3 flights of  late 17th century stone stairs. In the end B.A. walked down,  a paramedic in front and a paramedic behind. He was carefully strapped onto a bed in the ambulance, I got in, and off we went. Yes, I believe there were tourists in the House at the time.  

Apparently the rest of the  staff was terrified for B.A., but they all kept their distance because they didn't want to get in the way. That was very kind of them, really, and the best decision. 

So for the first time in either of our lives, B.A. and I went to the hospital in an ambulance, and although I remembered my keys and phone, I forgot my wallet. However, I phoned French Pretend Son-in-Law from the waiting room, and he came within half an hour and loaned me £20 so I could get home eventually. 

After two hours, I asked if B.A. was out of the x-rays yet, and was sent along to what is sort of the triage department and found B.A. on a wheeled bed. All told, we were in the Emergency Department from 2 PM until almost 11 PM, and the people there were really kind to us. When I asked a young nurse for a pillow for B.A., he remembered to bring it. And a nurse practitioner remembered us from neurosurgery and smile at us often. One of the paramedics asked me how B.A. was doing. So those were the "people helping" Mr Rogers famously said children should look for in sad times. 

Unprecedentedly, we were told, Neurosurgery had called Emergency before Emergency called them, to say that B.A. should be transferred to Neurosurgery as soon as they had a bed ready, and so B.A. and I went by ambulance to Neurosurgery. 

B.A. asked if I could stay overnight in the Family Room because he was scared of what might happen to me going home late at night, but the nurse was reluctant--the Family Room is really for families who come from Far Away (e.g. John O'Groats)--and so was I,  having spent a very poor night in the Family Room back in March. So I went home by cab and phoned the ward to leave the message that I was fine. 

And then it was Friday.  B.A. fasted all day, waiting for the operation that never came.  A surgeon came to see B.A., explained to us why B.A. needed the operation. He was forced to retract his statement that B.A. would be home a couple of days after his op, when I informed him that B.A. would not come home until he could walk.  

"I'm so glad you were here when he came," said B.A., and this was better than a fur coat and a diamond necklace or any other present I can imagine.

I went home by bus before dark. When it was determined that B.A. wouldn't be operated on that day, he had dinner. 

And then it was Saturday.  Thank God, I broke all the visiting hours rules and arrived at 10 AM because I soon discovered B.A. had had a very bad night. He had been sedated and put in solitary confinement. He was still frightened and disoriented when I got there. At his request, I read him all the prayers and readings for the Trad Mass of the day, including the set prayers for afterwards. 

B.A. fasted all day, waiting for the operation that never came.

And then it was Sunday.  B.A.'s operation--his third--happened on Sunday between 12 and 4: 30 PM. Having ascertained by phone at around 8 AM that he was well-rested, I had carried out my usual Sunday schedule. When I got to the ward at 3 PM., B.A. wasn't in his room. 

I was told that he had gone into surgery at noon. I was rather frightened, as B.A.'s last surgery had lasted only about 2 hours.  But there was nothing I could do, so I sat in the neurosurgery waiting room until someone turned on the television, and then I went to the chapel, where I prayed the rosary until I got the call that B.A. was back on the ward. 

I scurried back upstairs, and there was B.A. under an oxygen mask, his beard trimmed right down but his moustache left bushy, so that he looked like a British soldier who had been ambushed in Afghanistan in the mid-19th century and wandered around the desert for a few days before rescue. 

"My beads,"  said B.A.. "They should be in the pocket of my dressing-gown. Are they there?"

His old green bathrobe was lying on the foot of the bed. I reached into the pocket and found the worn old rosary he bought from a Romany pedlar woman in Poland in 1990.  He loves it so much, I don't usually bring it to the hospital, lest it get lost, but it was the only one I had in my bag on Thursday. So after I showed it to him--and he relaxed--I put another rosary into his hand, and put his Polish rosary back in my bag.

I sat with him from 4:30 PM until 8 PM, ignoring the mid-point chuck-out time, and took various buses as far as I could before calling a taxi because have spent so much on taxis. Actually, a friend called the taxi for me, because although my brain is starting to do very weird things (which does not surprise me, since I keep reading popular science books about the brain and what stress does to it), I had the very good idea to go to the home of friends, out of the rain, dark, and cold, and ask to call from there. 

I had bought what the Scots call a donner-kebab, so I sat at a proper dinner table with proper friends and ate my donner-kebab washed down with proper Strong Drink, which I felt I sorely needed. We had a good chat about Cardinal Burke's Glasgow Mass and other interesting things, and then the taxi was called, and I went home and went to bed. 

And now it is Monday, and I am gathering strength for the next battle, which is to keep B.A. under medical supervision until he can walk properly. He didn't break his neck, but he could have broken his neck, and he's not going to break his neck because he's going to get all the medical treatment he needs from his country, no matter what I have to do or say to get it, no matter whose duty roster is messed up or which NHS targets won't be reached.

*Amongst other things, my memory for all the appointments is patchy. I hadn't worked all day because I had taken B.A. to a different kind of surgeon altogether by wheelchair and cab. The bizarre NHS story there is that the receptionist refused to tell me what the surgeon's name was, on the grounds that she couldn't pronounce it. When I asked her to write it down, she told me to ask a nurse. 

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. 

A Good/Good Day

Benedict Ambrose is in hospital and seems much better today than he was yesterday. The hospital has  been filling him up with fluid, and weighing him, and feeding him his dinner so early that in the evening he drinks Ensure Plus of his own volition.

I feel really happy about all that.

Back at the Historical Ranch, I applied some lessons I learned from Cal Newport's Deep Work to get as much work done as possible. It was extremely awesome. I got 1.5 hours of Polish study (deep work) done before breakfast. During breakfast I trawled through the internet looking for leads (shallow work). Then I went back to deep work and wrote a complicated piece before the shallow work of watching a film I'm reviewing. I hit pause when it was time for a meeting (shallow work).

After the meeting, I powered through the late afternoon by writing two articles (deep work), and then I ran out of the house to get to the hospital to see B.A.

When I got home (taxi, so as to get here before dark--£10), I finished watching the film. It's called "Because of Gracia" and I liked it way better than "Bella." Everyone's going to compare it to "Bella," so I might as well be first.

I wonder if I am able to accomplish that much tomorrow. That would be AMAZING.

Meanwhile, I brought B.A. the chess set I bought him after his first operation back in March, and this time we actually opened the box. Well, I opened the box. B.A. grumbled about the social politics of being publicly interested in chess. He seems to think that even a living skeleton can get hassled for being too posh if he's in a NHS hospital. However I refused, as usual, to get sucked into the class war/delusion, and happily read aloud about pawns and pikemen.