Stories that make sense
How easy the return to work was. Transition back to work was fine, my brain switched gears beautifully, working part time is challenging but helps me keep a sense of proportion, and the infant has taken to nursery better than I ever dared hope.
(Portsmouth skyline not really relevant, unless you want to talk about the Isle of Wight catamaran as a liminal space or something like that.)
Does this thing make the slightest bit of difference? Who knows. I’m increasingly convinced that all baby sleep interventions do is give the parents something to think about and the illusion of control while the baby gets to the point of sleeping in its own bed/through the night in its own sweet time.
This book deserves a longer post, but I’ve lost the evening to a gallbladder flare-up and am feeling too sore/sleepy/shaky to say much more than that it’s good to see someone with the intellectual clout of bell hooks talking seriously about love – something you don’t often come across outside self-help and theology. There’s a bit of both of those in there, but it’s more than that.
In the introduction to my copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Years, Jeri Johnson draws attention to the way that certain pieces of furniture reappear in different settings through the book – the sort of thing it’s easy to do in film, but which requires considerable skill to pull off in a novel. I’ve been thinking of this a lot as I try to assimilate objects and artworks from my late father’s house into my own. Sometimes it’s been a bit of a challenge – twenty-first century walls are not, on the whole, tall enough to give nineteenth century portraits the breathing room they deserve – but this little prayer fits beautifully next our front door.
In Pa’s house (smaller than this one, and certainly fuller) it was clamped onto the end of a bookcase. It hung in the bathroom at the house before. And at the house before that, I’m pretty sure. I don’t know about the one before that; I was only four. Reading it over and over, it’s sunk into my head. I know it by heart, without ever having deliberately set out to learn it.
In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever read this prayer aloud. I would find it difficult to do the play the man bit seriously; when I pray it in my head, which I quite often do when I need a prayer in the morning and can’t remember how the Collect for Grace begins, I can add a mental footnote (‘you know what I mean’). I remember Pa telling me how when he was a child he thought ‘play the man’ referred to a stage role, and ‘perform them’ followed on from that. That’s got me thinking about how nobody (hardly anybody) really gets what ‘performative’ means (me included), but that’s not really the point here.
In my memory I also see it quoted in the visitors’ book – ‘… laughter and kind faces; let cheerfulness abound with industry…’ in the spiky handwriting of a dear departed friend. I don’t remember a huge amount of industry happening in my childhood home (my mother, I am sure, would beg to differ) but it most definitely had its cheerful moments, many of them associated with that very friend.
The angel – you can’t quite see in the photograph of a photograph – is from Southwell. We visited Southwell this summer, but I didn’t think to look for the angel. Nor did we look at the famous Southwell Leaves, which were in a part of the minster that looked a bit daunting to attempt with a pushchair. We did, however, find a memorial to the victims of the Katyn massacre – something we would most definitely have sought out had we known about it, as my husband’s great-grandfather was among those murdered. It brought us up short; we’d only diverted to Southwell to tick another cathedral off the list and find lunch. A surprise – a stop-and-think-for-a-moment – a remembering – keep it alive – keep them alive.
Remembering is an inexact art. Was that prayer really in the bathroom? My memory tried to put it in the bathroom at my father’s last house, too, but I know I unscrewed it from the bookcase myself. I’m getting confused with prayers for washing of hands. Already the family stories blur and swirl. My brother (happy birthday!) went to look for the house where those portraits must have hung, and now it’s a chip shop. Except that was twelve years ago, assuming he went when I assume he did. We write down what we can remember, and then wonder how long the writing survives. Digital decays fast: I shouldn’t be surprised if that framed prayer outlives this blog. As for the memory that goes with it, that’s another question. In the long view, it doesn’t really matter. If the prayer survives, it will be because somebody likes it, for the sake of its associations (my father, me, Southwell, who knows) or for its own. In the meantime, I see it as I put my shoes and coat on and prepare to leave the house:
Give us to go blithely on our business all this day, and bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.
There were some extremely Christmassy flower arrangements in the cathedral a few weeks ago, I assume for the Christmas fair. Gold ribbon and poinsettia and all that sort of thing. Now, of course, they’re all gone, and we’re paying no attention to the huge tree in the corner. Such is the tension between secular Christmas and church Advent.
All this to say that my mind doesn’t go straight to ‘flowers’ on 2 December. But, as you see, there are a few still around. Apart from this delightfully Goth polyanthus, which feels appropriate to the season in colour scheme even if it’s flowering rather earlier than I expected, the French lavender in the front garden is still going, and in the back the Peruvian lilies haven’t given up yet.
I’m beginning to feel more equal to the garden, actually. Last week I finally chopped out the sixth and last dead box bush (devoured by beetles last year along with most of the rest of the country’s) and before that I’d pruned the fruit trees and trimmed the beeches back. There are still a load of wild strawberries to pull up, but it definitely feels like an improvement. Last year I had to get a man in to get it all under control. Worth every penny – but it feels so good to have been able to do it myself this time.
This is an almost offensively photogenic bowlful, but don’t be fooled. I never used to be much of a one for yoghurt, but I’m still breastfeeding so I need the calcium. And I’m trying to keep my gallbladder from tying itself in a knot, so it’s zero fat. The fruit (Tesco ‘perfectly imperfect’, would be nicer without strawberries, which don’t freeze well and probably weren’t all that in the first place, but it’s perfectly adequate) is there to make it bearable. Greek style is, I have discovered, nicer than the normal sort, but neither is as good as proper full fat yoghurt. Occasionally I lick the spoon after doling out the toddler’s portion, just to make sure.
This has been a year of minor but inconvenient health problems, of which the gallstones have been the most serious. They first made their presence felt after last year’s Christmas dinner, got increasingly uppish through the next month, and put me in hospital with an infection and weird liver markers at the end of January. Since then I’ve been on the waiting list for removal of the gallbladder, and not eating sausages. The trick has been not to cut out fat altogether – still breastfeeding, after all – but to spread it (ha) out through the day. Most of the time I get it right. When I don’t it’s excruciatingly painful. Apparently this is a known thing among people who have recently had babies. Now you know.
I’ve also had mastitis twice, tripped over a park bench and bruised my sternum, and picked up a couple of coughs and colds from the nursery germ pool. As I say, nothing serious – in fact, in terms of overall fitness I’m probably better than I have been since 2021 – some of it a bit silly, in fact – just tedious, really. The list of things I’m looking forward to being able to eat again continues to grow.
I have caught up with all ten seasons of The Great British Sewing Bee over the last year, and, while it’s great fun, it does convey a somewhat distorted impression of sewing for fun, with an entirely artificial sense of urgency. After all, very few of us would deliberately set out to make a prom dress in five hours.
The exception, of course, is the “fancy dress costume for a child” transformation challenge; it is quite plausible that one might find oneself landed with the obligation to produce an outfit FOR TOMORROW and then cough up a quid for the privilege.
To be clear, this isn’t what happened here (apart from the charity donation bit). My child is not yet speaking and doesn’t know what fancy dress is. And I had rather more than ninety minutes warning. However, I did feel that turning:
into an ice cream, over the course of three lunchtime naps, was very much in the Sewing Bee spirit.
This was a couple of months ago, and I shouldn’t think any of it will fit any more even if it were the weather for T-shirts, however bedecked they might be. But I did find a larger, yellow, frilly T-shirt in a charity shop today, so maybe it’s worth taking some care in disassembling the thing…
I went out for a walk this afternoon, climbing from sea level, or just below, to the heady height of about twenty metres above. When I came down again I could almost believe that we had a range of hills the far side of the fen.
I also saw a spectacular shadow and several good dogs, of whom one is featured here:
My habit of observing 1 November, All Saints, as the beginning of winter often feels just as ridiculous as using the winter solstice. This year was no exception: the beginning of the month was unremittingly gloomy, but not what you’d call cold. But here we are, three weeks in and not even touching Advent yet, and it’s got properly cold (by British standards, anyway). We didn’t get the surprise snowfall that hit much of the country; instead, it’s been bright and sharp, there was a very thin layer of frost on the ground, and my ears got thoroughly chilly when I went out on the bike this morning.
I ran out of renewals on a library book, which is something I don’t remember having done in a long time, maybe never, and if I did it was probably because I’d lost the book, rather than because I honestly wanted to finish it but was going painfully slowly, which was the case here. The book in question was Eva Ibbotson’s A Glove Shop in Vienna and (as this edition was trying to market itself) Other Winter Stories. In fact I don’t think that even half the stories were particularly wintry, but never mind.
I’m very on-off with Eva Ibbotson. I adored her witch stories when I was a child. Two decades or so later I found her romances for adults simultaneously enchanting and infuriating, and reading this collection I remembered why. On the one hand, there’s the food, the scenery, and the balletomania. This collection also has a carp swimming in a bathtub, which will make perfect sense to anyone who’s encountered a Mittel- to Eastern European Christmas Eve, and made me smile. On the other, there are the manic pixie dream girls (not like other girls!) and the not-really-examined nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. I kept finding that I had to be in a very specific mood, and given that I had to be in it eighteen times over it’s no wonder that I ran right up against the renewal limit. But I got there on Thursday lunchtime, wooden spoon in one hand and book in the other, and the second last story nearly made me cry, and I remembered to take it back to the library on Friday morning, so everything was ok.
I continue to read speculative fiction on my e-reader when I find myself awake at strange hours of the night. In more or less chronological order:
Babel (R. F. Kuang) This had a stonkingly good premise and some important things to say, but I kept getting kicked out by careless anachronisms. For reasons which become apparent over the course of the book, it is vital that it is set in the 1830s; a pity, then, about the fountain pens, the respectable women thinking nothing of going into pubs, and the running water in student digs. At one point a character reflects that there will be no omnibus at that time of night. (‘Nor that decade,’ I muttered to myself.) The author has clearly gone to a lot of trouble to get Oxford right, but it’s Oxford of about five years ago. I kept reading, however; couldn’t help it.
Lady Eve’s Last Con (Rebecca Fraimow): a space caper. Our heroine is navigating intergalactic high society, trying to get revenge on the rich bore who broke her sister’s heart, and trying not to fall for his charismatic half-sister. Absolutely delightful.
The King Is Dead (Naomi Libicki): a young man who has failed to distinguish himself on the field of battle is appointed as armour bearer to the deeply traumatised brother of the eponymous late king. As complicated as that sounds, it gets more so. I really appreciated the thoughtful worldbuilding in this: religion, the way magic works, food practices, gender dynamics, all of it coming together to make a complicated and coherent society. And a really satisfying story, too.
Kathleen Jowitt 