I’m visiting family at the moment. Mine not to reason why, but the shoebox containing the Christmas crib was on the kitchen table, so here it is.
This olive wood Nativity scene was a fixture of childhood Christmases, and I’ve yet to find one that I like quite so much. Oh, there’s always a bit of a debate about which of the Magi should actually be a shepherd, and baby Jesus is sellotaped into the manger, but next to this all the sets on the market seem tacky, juvenile, or both. (Not a word against my Playmobil set, which is, after all, a toy.)
There have been a few additions over the years. The violinist angel came from my aunt in Germany. One or other of my brothers added the ostrich and the elephant. And I think the phoenix and the dragon that you can’t quite see down the side of the stable were my fault. When it comes to it, our commitment to tasteful understatement tends to come second to a slightly childish sense of humour. But after all, why shouldn’t there be an elephant?
This little angel has been sitting up on top of the bookcase ever since last Christmas – well, last Epiphany, I suppose, when we took the tree down.
She was waiting to be mended: she’s a ceramic bust attached to a plastic cone, with the joins covered up by her robe, and the glue had failed. Since her head is quite a bit heavier than her body, she was tending to tilt alarmingly.
She’s done very well, considering what we paid for her. I can’t remember what we paid for her. Less than what I spent on St Etheldreda, certainly. She came from one of those fantastic shops that sell all sorts of tat extremely cheaply and also do mobile phone repairs. This one was called Circle 7 and was on the market square in Woking. The delightful innocence of its staff can be evidenced by the fact that I once found furry handcuffs displayed in the toy section, along with the cowboy hats and water pistols. I didn’t buy any of those things. I was probably looking at stickers. I’d imagine it’s no longer there: I think that whole section of the town has been redeveloped in recent years. We left in 2013, which makes this little angel at least nine years old, possibly more.
I finally got around to fixing her on Monday evening. Lately I’ve been enjoying fixing things. Darning, mostly. There’s something rather satisfying about transforming a garment from ‘unwearable’ to ‘wearable’. But I’ve fixed the angel, too. Just a bit of superglue put her head securely back on her body.
It’s St Andrew’s day, so it seemed appropriate to share the most authentically Scottish decoration in my possession. (Plus, this one is robust enough to be floating around the Christmas boxes without wrapping, and it’s a long time until we actually put a tree up.)
This bauble depicts the paddle steamer Waverley under way in a body of water that I can’t identify. It came in a hamper of Waverley goodies which was a present from my father a couple of years back. There was a tin of shortbread. I now use the tin for storing herbal teabags. There was a tube of biscuits. I now use the tube for storing pencils. There were probably other things with less durable packaging. And there was this bauble.
As a family, we’re very fond of the Waverley. (My great-grandparents were shipwrecked on their honeymoon when the paddle steamer Empress struck a pier at Calais. They survived the experience, as perhaps may be inferred from my existence. It hasn’t bothered later generations.) We’ve gone round the Isle of Wight and along the Dorset coast on her. You can go down and watch the engines pumping and pumping, and the smell is just glorious. I’ve dashed across London to see her steaming up the Thames under Tower Bridge. There’s something immensely moving (pun not intended) about this grand old ship still doing the thing she was built to do, seventy years on. Something that was built to serve, still serving.
The St Nicholas decorations are great fun, very beautifully made, and rather expensive. Expensive, I think, because they’re beautifully made, but nevertheless outside what I think of as a sensible price for a Christmas tree ornament. I bought several of the Alice in Wonderland ones a couple of years ago, week by week, and had to write them into my budget.
However! I went into the cathedral shop several months ago, and there was an Etheldreda in the sale, so I bought her.
St Etheldreda was a princess of East Anglia and, after a vow of chastity, two marriages, and no children, founded the monastic house that became, several hundred years later, Ely Cathedral. Of course it’s difficult to pick one’s way between histories and hagiographies, and this is the period of English history where plenty of rulers ended up as saints. I’ve devoted very little time to research, but I get the impression that she was a formidable woman. All her sisters ended up as saints. I think they must have been quite formidable, too.
I’ve lived in a few cathedral cities in my time – Winchester, Exeter, Guildford (look, I’m not going to be picky), and now Ely. We left Winchester before I could read, and almost every time we’ve gone back it’s been to ride on buses. In Exeter, I lived most of my life on the university campus. Guildford’s only had a diocese since the twentieth century, and the cathedral is somewhat set apart, up on a hill.
In Ely, though, I get the sense of a city that exists because of its cathedral and because of its market. Ely is tiny as cities go: it can’t get much bigger because most of the land around it is below sea level. The big expansion has happened fifteen miles south, around Cambridge. In Ely I get the sense of a city that exists in very much the same way that it has for centuries. These days the cathedral brings in tourists as well as pilgrims and the market… well, the market attracts people wishing to buy stuff, some of which the medievals would have recognised and some of which they wouldn’t.
In some ways, Ely feels like everywhere I’ve ever lived, all at once: the rich light on old stone of Winchester and Exeter and Cambridge, the proximity to agriculture (tractors!) of the Welsh borders and the Isle of Wight, the excellent rail connections of Woking, the hills and the cobbles of Guildford. In others, it feels like nowhere else.
Etheldreda wouldn’t recognise the lush farmland and the complex system of drainage ditches that supports it. She’d be completely boggled by the railway, the fact that I can get to London in little more than an hour. She’d be bewildered by my bicycle, come to that. But there’s not much you can do to that big wide sky. Contrails aside, she’d recognise that.
One last thing: it took me a little while to catch on to the fact that St Etheldreda was also, later, known as St Audrey. St Audrey as in St Audrey’s Fair. St Audrey as in tawdry. The absolute blinginess that the designers have endowed her with her is really rather fitting.
While I’m on the subject of cathedrals, I loved Dr Eleanor Janega’s latest piece. (Even if she doesn’t talk about Winchester, Exeter, Guildford or Ely.)
This year for my Advent blog series I’m going with an idea that’s intrigued me for a while: I’m going to pick one decoration every day, and write about it. Having got all the Christmas boxes down from the loft (causing some damage to the loft hatch) yesterday, I am at least confident that I have far more than twenty-four of the things.
Of course, this may not be the best timing, since this year we’ve acquired a cat with an unshakeable conviction that anything sparkly, trailing, or both, is hers to chase and destroy. In previous years, we know, she has shredded an angel and made herself sick eating lametta. Also, I’m not at home all the way through December so may have to skip or improvise a few days. But we’ll see how it goes. (I think we’ve got rid of all the lametta, for a start.)
This object might be familiar: I’ve certainly featured it in previous Advent series, and usually early on in the season. Every January I close all the doors again and flatten it carefully and put it away for next year. It isn’t exactly a decoration, though it’s certainly decorative. It has a title (not sure I’ve ever come across an Advent calendar with a title before): Fling Wide The Doors. It’s an Advent calendar, but it runs all the way to the Baptism of Christ. It’s designed for children, but I find it helpful even after several years’ consecutive use. It looks fabulous with a light inside (after some experimentation, I’ve taken to using a USB bottle-stopper light in an empty gin bottle; very Anglican, I know). It engages with some heavy subjects (see the skeletons at Our Lord’s feet?) but in such a way as to make me always want to open the next day’s door, or doors. (There isn’t one for tomorrow, though. It picks up with St Andrew on the 30th.)
Anyway, I love Advent, with all its glory and terror and anticipation, and this calendar gets all of that. To a surprising extent, considering it’s just made of cardboard and tracing paper.
(Incidentally, if you watch the Advent Procession at Ely Cathedral, you get to see me reading the second lesson. Purple coat, 28 minutes in.)
Why use one word when eight will do? Less flippantly, it’s been my custom for the last few years now to set a compass for the coming twelve months. This year I’ve been layering the hours onto that eight-pointed cycle, too, so it looks rather like this (the hyperlinks go to the Angel of the Hour, which I’ve been using this year to give structure to my working day):
There are some there I’ve used before – love, courage, clarity – and some new ones – heritage was a bit of a surprise, and souplesse comes from cycling commentary, where it means something like flexibility, style, smoothness. I think I’ll need to feel my way into both of those.
It probably deserves to have a space of its own, and not be mixed up with my takeaway order and what I did at work that day, but actually I rather like it that way. Because that’s the point of it: all time is holy; this dark into light, light into dark, cycle is the structure that underlies life as I experience it.
Thank you for the opportunity to settle gently into our new home. Thank you for the business of settling in, as a distraction from the culture shock outside.
Well, there’s the vaccine, obviously. Vaccines, plural. (Insert the usual bus joke here – but the ‘waiting ages’ part isn’t quite true this time, is it? Goes to show what can be done when the will and the funding can be found.) I for one am tentatively beginning to think of 2021 as being a little less of a blank than 2020, though of course I’ll be a long way down the list.
I seem to be shelving ‘hopes’ in the same place as ‘intentions‘: today, I just don’t have the energy for anything specific. (Though maybe we’re going to acquire a cat.) This prompt is looking more generally, though, and I’m going to go as general as you can get: humanity.
And by
hope for the world: humanity
I mean both
I hope that all over the world people will come to appreciate their kinship with all their fellow human beings, and will act accordingly
and also
I believe that any hope there is for this lovely, vulnerable, world, and for all its peoples, lies in our recognising and claiming our humanity, and in bearing the responsibility that we all have for our fellow human beings and for the world we live in
In the immortal words of Rick from Casablanca, ‘I never make plans that far ahead’. Actually, that’s not entirely true. But I’m conscious today, as I have been for the last few days, that setting myself any kind of commitment or expectation feels unnecessary, uncalled for. Unfair on my future self who’ll have to act on it.
Today, I just don’t want to. And that feels like something to pay attention to.
Oh, I have a growing list of things I want to do When It’s Safe To Do So: ‘go to the cinema and watch more films’ and ‘take actual skating lessons’. Will that be in 2021? I hope so, but I’m not going to pin a year to it. I have plenty of vague thoughts about ‘more piano practice’ and ‘showing up to morning prayer’ and ‘finishing the next book, maybe in time for Christmas’, and other things like that. But the thing about things like that is that I’ve been adding more and more of those. It feels like time to stop. I expect the ones I really want to do something with, I’ll do something with.
So, as things stand, with three days left of 2020, my only commitment for 2021, is to make space. And that feels like plenty.
Didn’t we do this just a few days ago? No, not quite. Well, has anything changed between then and now?
Yes. An eleventh hour Brexit deal. A lousy one, admittedly, but so much better than the alternative. And, it turns out, for me, better than the eleven months of things being more or less the same as they’d always been but knowing they were about to come to a screeching and painful halt. Well, you’ve been through this year, too. You know about that grim, resigned, fatalist waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop, wondering how and whether what’s going to happen next can turn out to be anything other than awful, wanting things to be different, goodness knows, but maybe not given how awful they might end up being…
2020 has taught me about change.
I wrote earlier this month about my self of eleven years ago and her inability, or stubborn refusal, to imagine that things might possibly get any better than they were. I’ve been thinking about the landscapes I’ve lived in, the way they’re shaped by time and tide, of how human intervention can only hold back so much of that process. It took me a little while to make the link with Goldengrove unleaving: a lot of this year’s depressive funk seems to have come from the realisation of my own mortality. Today I’ve been given occasion to remember my sixteen year old self, how resistant she was to change, how insistent on holding everything she could (precious little) in place, while all the while everything went on changing around her. This year I’ve felt just as helpless; it’s just been on a bigger scale.
This year, we’ve been sitting in this strange stasis, waiting. Waiting and hoping, waiting and dreading. I’ve hardly been travelling hopefully, but goodness knows I haven’t wanted to arrive, either. I haven’t wanted to know the news. And yet, when I’ve looked, it’s been awful, but not universally awful.
Will I remember this, next time I get stuck? Probably not, going on past form. Will I ever learn how to let myself imagine that things might change for the better? I fear that I might not. And yet it’s been the signs of change that have been the most comfort to me.
Kathleen Jowitt 