Stories that make sense
I had heard of this book, which is about St Teresa of Avila and St Thérèse of Lisieux, before. Until I picked it up in Oxfam a couple of weeks ago I had somehow managed to miss the fact that it was written by Vita Sackville-West.
I talked to Shaz over at Jera’s Jamboree about my finicky taste in exercise books, my abiding preference for paper diaries, and my unashamedly fannish choice of ink colour. In short, stationery love.
There’s a picture of a page of the first draft of A Spoke in the Wheel, too, if you’re really desperate to know more about that. Although I should warn you that it’s pretty much illegible, and I deliberately chose a page that doesn’t give away much of the plot.
When I was in my early teens, this book was one of my absolute favourites. It’s about a British teenager who finds himself in Romania just as the Ceaucescu regime is falling. I loved it for the idealism, for the music (the narrator is a member of a youth orchestra), for the sense of hope.
The lanyard came from a friend of my father’s who used to work for the EU, and is included with a certain wistfulness.
From a practice walk on Tuesday – this is what Cambridge looks like in the spring.
(Twelve miles, carrying 8.5kg. Nothing to speak of in the way of hills, unless you count the Castle Mound. I’ve obtained the items of kit that I wished I had last time – waterproof trousers, a silk sleeping bag liner – and have come to a decision about the rucksack question.)
Loveliest of trees, etc. Though I have to confess that I did not go about the woodlands to find these cherry blossoms, but just wandered down the road. It was raining.
This year I’ve been doing Lent differently; by which I mean that I’ve not been doing very much differently at all. I haven’t given up anything, partly in an attempt to disconnect the idea of virtue from that of self-deprivation, and partly to see if there’s any correlation between Lenten discipline and the seasonal depression that tends to land early in March and lift around Easter.
It turns out that not giving up meat, not giving up alcohol, not giving up coffee, not giving up tea, not giving up biscuits, and not giving up anything else, has made precisely zero difference, and March has been as much of a slog as it always is. This has, oddly enough, made me feel rather optimistic. It would have been annoying to discover that I’d brought all my misery on myself by trying too hard to be ‘good’. Next year I can do what I feel like doing and not worry about it. And I also know for next year not to schedule any social events during March, because I’ll either flake out and disappoint people, or turn up and then cry and embarrass them.
I keep meaning to write about the structure of the Church year, and how useful I find it. Firstly, there’s the way that it keeps turning on and on with or without my involvement. I can fail to get out of bed three Sundays running, work a weekend away, and then go on holiday, and when I come back I can still reorient myself by the colour of the altar frontal, the readings, and the anthem. And then there’s the fact that there is actually an officially sanctioned time for feeling dreadful, followed by a time of feeling a huge amount better and being thankful for that. That bit’s coming up soon. I’m looking forward to it.
March blows in,
yellow, ragged-edged.
I wait:
too tired for anything but waiting;
too weak for anything but waiting;
soon it must surely
tear through me, open me up
until I know, heart-deep, the brightness
that now I only see.
Some books, you know that if you so much as pick them up, the rest of the afternoon, the rest of the weekend, will just disappear. If they’re the first in the a series, make that a fortnight you’ve just lost. And yet you open them anyway…
(I didn’t get this in Asda for £1.99. I got it in a charity shop for 50p.)
Three and a half kilograms. I’m practising for the Camino Inglés by gradually increasing the weight I carry with me when I’m out walking. That was today’s load, and the first time I’d been out with the rucksack I bought at university, which I’ve never taken on a long walk. Previously I’ve used my godmother’s rucksack, which alas is no longer in a usable state. (If anyone reading this has ever experimented with re-waterproofing the inside of a rucksack, I’d love to hear about your experience!)
There are other bits of kit on my mind: sleeping bag; socks; sticks. Do I buy new walking poles (I have no idea what’s happened to my old ones) or do I take the more picturesque but less foldable hazel staff? But the question I really need to think about at the moment is: boots? Do I use my old ones, veterans of my university years, and trust they won’t fall apart on me? Do I use the current ones, which were meant to be a stopgap and feel a bit insubstantial, and trust they won’t fall apart on me? Or do I buy a new pair? If I’m going to do that, I need to do it soon, so that I have a chance to walk them in.
At the beginning of April I’m going to spend a long weekend walking the Isle of Wight Coast Path, to get some practice in on gradients. We are severely lacking in hills in Cambridge; I’m currently making do with climbing the stairs to the top of the building I work in. Meanwhile, my brother, who’ll be joining me on the walk, has spent the last few months working at a ski resort and is probably disgustingly fit. He was disgustingly fit before he left, after all. I can console myself with the thought that my Spanish is probably better than his.
It’s been good to think of Spanish as training, too; it’s meant that when I’ve found it difficult to get out of bed (this winter, with the boomerang virus; this morning, with depression) I can do five minutes of Duolingo on my phone and still feel that I’m making progress. I can also take small, practical actions that don’t take much physical energy but that still need to be done.
On Thursday, for example, I booked the ferry tickets. And that’s a momentous proceeding. All my practice walks, all my Spanish learning and my dithering over boots; all that could just be in the interests of general self-improvement. But a ferry ticket, now, you can’t argue with that. It’s going to happen!
Kathleen Jowitt 