Stories that make sense
A quiet day. Yesterday’s party is over; last week’s guest has gone home. I’m still feeling sufficiently run down after the slow-moving cold of the last fortnight to be reluctant to do much.
But things are happening, even so. Even on a quiet day, there’s a lively wind ruffling the river and shaking the bare twigs of the trees. Things are moving.
‘This is just ridiculously perfect,’ I said.
We were four days into a narrow boat holiday with my in-laws, six of us, chugging gently up and down the Avon. We’d been up as far as Stratford-upon-Avon, and now we were heading downstream again, towards Evesham and the Severn, towards Bredon Hill.
We moored for the evening at Birlingham Wharf, where there’s space for just one boat, and the closest human habitation is ten minutes walk away. We sat out on the bank, cooked sausages. I wrapped myself up in a blanket. Somewhere there was a cuckoo.
And then there was the balloon, silent, drifting.
It was the loveliest evening.
Nobody gets angels right, particularly around Christmas. No six year old in glittery tulle wings, not this vision in her plastic farthingale, not even Michael Sheen’s Aziraphale, manages to convey the sheer awesomeness of a creature whose first words are very often, ‘Do not be afraid’. Which implies that they are, in fact, something to be afraid of.
Which is something that has been said many times before by many other people. So I won’t labour the point further, or mutter for very long about how the belief that angels are what our deceased loved ones become misses some important points about what it is to be human. (In fact, that’s the thing about all the portrayals of angels I mentioned in the first paragraph: they’re very, very, human.)
Angels in disguise are another matter, of course. If I ever met any, they were carrying umbrellas. (Incidentally, I read somewhere that P. L. Travers thought of Mary Poppins – her Mary Poppins, the mystical, supernatural being of the later books, not Disney’s instrument of 1950s conformity – as one of the archangels. Which makes sense. Benevolent, but still terrifying.)
Angels bring news, instructions. Sometimes you see them in stained glass windows or nativity sets carrying neat little banners saying Gloria in excelsis Deo or Peace on earth, goodwill to all. I’ve been listening out for messages this year. Some of them I haven’t liked at all. Others have not been exactly clear. I have learned over and over again that I am not as good at communicating as I think I am, that I operate on assumptions that turn out to be incorrect. I am trying to keep on listening.
Early in the year, I demanded a neon sign. The next neon sign that I saw read:
Started at the bottom.
Now you’re here.
Which is certainly true as far as it goes. The question is, where exactly is here?
I will keep my ears open. And my eyes.
As is often the case, my favourite book of the year is one that was actually published several years ago. Eleven, in this case, and the story begins twenty years before that, when the author moves into the Dower Houses at Morville and begins working on the garden. Or hundreds of years before that, when the monastery is built at Morville. Or decades before that, when she’s born. Or hundreds of years before that, when the monastery is built at Morville. Or thousands of years before that, when the Shropshire landscape is formed.
It’s the story of the landscape and the monastery. It’s the story of the author and the garden and her relationship with the garden. It’s about time, measured in days and sunlight and fruit. It’s about people. It raised in me a powerful nostalgia for the place where I grew up, which was not far away, and it observes the changes in society and agriculture with a clear and sometimes regretful eye, but I don’t think it’s nostalgic in itself. It lives too much in the present, and is too conscious of the constancy of change, for that.
Today I had to buy a box of tissues, as the cold which has been making me lethargic, despondent and irritable for the last two weeks has finally got to the ‘runny nose’ stage, which for me means nosebleeds too.
Actually, the current bug aside, 2019 hasn’t been too bad for me health wise. A slight iron deficiency got picked up in the summer when I attempted to give blood, and there was another bug which had all the symptoms of a nasty cold except the cough and runny nose, but I think that was about it.
Most excitingly, there was one morning this year when I woke up with the motivation, energy, enthusiasm, everything, squashed by depression, and managed to be kind to myself about it. This is revolutionary.
I think I know how it happened, too. I’ve spent a lot of time this year writing from the perspective of a character who spends much of the action becoming increasingly depressed. I have had to take care to differentiate between her perception of reality and actually reality. It’s hardly surprising if that has helped me get a bit of perspective myself, to remember that what’s really there is bigger than the space in my head. Even if that’s a little bit more difficult when that head is completely bunged up.
2019 was a year of weddings: four, in fact. Weddings come in waves: the first rush straight after university, then a steady trickle through one’s twenties. It had more or less dried up for us by last year, but this year there were plenty. Some had been a long time coming – no nine years from engagement to wedding, in one case. Each was a very good day.
I identified my cousin Nick’s wedding day as the best day of 2019 when I was flicking back through my diary last night. It sticks in my memory as a long, sunlit, summer day that faded into an evening lit by twinkling lights strung around the garden. I remember sitting around drinking Pimms and lemonade under a shady tree. Trying to dance on a lawn that tilted towards the sea at an angle of about fifteen degrees (and the Gay Gordons is confusing enough on the level). The family, including partners, gathered together for the first time ever. Singing along with the band. A plentiful and eclectic selection of food. Guests from all over the world. My parents agreeing what a nice wedding it was.
(It made the front page of the Isle of Wight County Press (‘an Island man married his boyfriend from India’), which is a) hilarious; and b) something that I would never have imagined when I was a teenager, growing up under the shadow of Section 28.)
My friend Anne made me this sequinned bauble in the bi pride colours. It’s fabulously sparkly, particularly on a sunny day like today.
I spent a lot of time this summer looking for something that would say, as unambiguously as these words, ‘here is somebody who is both queer and Christian’, while not being confrontational about it. This was for a context where there were rainbows everywhere – and no way of telling what they meant, or, at least, if they might mean any more than a reference to Genesis 9. I wanted to identify myself as a safe person to ask for clarification, if necessary.
I am not sure that I managed it, but something else interesting happened. I found myself enjoying the ambiguity. I found myself wanting to be more visible. I have been wearing rainbows to church (getting compliments on them, too). I don’t know what other people think they mean, if anything, and I find that I’m not bothered by that.
But a bauble in stripes of pink, purple and blue, sparkling joyously in the afternoon sunlight? That’s for me, and I know exactly what it means, and I love it.
I am a great fan of this Advent calendar, which runs all the way from St Andrew’s day to Epiphany and features an eclectic selection of saints old and new, prophets, and phrases from the liturgy and the Bible behind its doors.
Today’s window shows Rosa Parks outside the bus where she started the historic boycott. I like the text that accompanies it, both the phrasing of ‘kept her seat’ and the choice of the verse from Isaiah: ‘Seek justice’, the implication that seeking justice for oneself is desirable and beneficial for others.
The world is troubled at the moment, with reactionary governments rising to power and injustice on the rise. I cannot imagine being as courageous as Rosa Parks. I can only pray for the courage to seek justice, and not to turn my eyes away from injustice.
There are two things that ‘sanctuary’ can mean, and both feel significant. Firstly, there’s the sense of safety, of being able to claim a refuge, of hanging onto the door handle of the church and invoking protection and justice.
And that comes from its older sense, of a place that is sanctified, holy, set apart. Which is more obvious, and more difficult. We’ll see where I go with it.
… a successful book launch
… a trip to the opera
… a week on the Book Bus
… new friends and old friends
… reading whatever I felt like
… learning to teach, and enjoying it
… expanded horizons (internal)
(finding space in my faith for the fullness of myself)
… railways that got better and better
… expanded horizons (external)
I came into this year, and in particular I went into the InterRail trip, thinking of it as the last chance to have fun before things got terrible. And who knows, it may still turn out to be that. I’ve been scared of 2019 for… well, two years. And so I was thinking of Patrick Leigh Fermor, hiking from the Netherlands to Constantinople during the rise of Nazism; I was thinking, do it now, in case you don’t have a chance later.
But about two days in I knew that I was going to have to go back. I was going to have to go back to Hamburg; I was going to have to go back to Copenhagen. I was going to have to bring other people to see them. I was going to have to go back to mainland Europe and see things I hadn’t got round to this time round.
I wrote, on the way home,
This isn’t the end of anything. This is about understanding that it’s all mine for the enjoying, that much more is possible than I ever thought, that in fact I can have both/and.
Maybe I won’t be able to. Maybe politics or money will get in the way. Maybe I’ll be doing other things. There are many things that might stop me – but it’s less likely, now, that I’ll be one of them.
So. It sounds ridiculous now, and goodness knows what it’ll sound like in a year’s time, but thank you, 2018, for hope.
Kathleen Jowitt 