Category: december days

December Reflections 9: shadows

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I’ve remarked before how having a camera in my hand makes me pay more attention to everything. I’ve been on the lookout for good shadows over the last couple of days. And the thing that I’ve noticed particularly is that the best ones come when the sun is particularly strong. Inside the house, where there are multiple light sources (overhead lamp, desk lamp, candle) there are shadows all over the place, but outside you don’t get any shadows to speak of unless the sun’s out. And it’s the rich, golden, slantwise sun that makes the really good ones.

My youngest brother has been staying with us, doing a bit of work experience at my office. It’s prompted me to think a bit about the way that I live my life, to remember that early mornings and long journeys aren’t necessarily the way things have to be. I don’t see anything much changing in the next few years. But it’s been good for me to remember that things look different in different lights.

December Reflections 8: biggest surprise of 2018

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The biggest surprise of 2018 had to be the moment when the creative writing workshop I was leading turned out to be not, as I’d assumed, adult learners, but a group of thirteen and fifteen year olds. That was a bit of a shock!

More generally, though, I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed teaching and tutoring. And by how much less intimidating it’s been than I would have expected. Then again, my own learning style is very much, ‘read around the subject a bit, and then jump in and have a go’, so I’ve found that it’s really been a question of equipping other people with the confidence to do that.

I’ve led a few creative writing workshops now, and undergone four days of tutor training. It turns out that ‘read around the subject a bit, and then jump in and have a go’ is an approach that lends itself fairly well to learning how to teach adults. Which is fortunate.

And I find myself thinking about how I could apply what I’ve learned in other settings, which in turn seems to be prodding at questions I thought I’d stopped asking years ago… Well, we’ll see what, if anything, happens there. If anything does, it’s going to take its time about it. Long enough for it not to be a surprise. And I’m fine with that.

December Reflections 7: home

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Home. It’s a touchy subject for me at the moment – both the concept as a whole, and also the way it currently exists in my life. We have a house inspection tomorrow, and I’m on edge. Part of it’s the whine of the vacuum cleaner, and the way that I keep seeing cobwebs, and dead leaves, and things that I should have washed up. Part of it’s just the knowledge that there’s going to be somebody in my house and there’s nothing I can do about it.

And all the time I’m very aware of how lucky I am compared to others – having a steady job, having a landlady who’s very – pardon the pun – accommodating, having a roof over my head at all. Sometimes, hoping for anything more than that feels flat-out greedy. Sometimes, I’m furious that I haven’t sorted it out yet. In the meantime, I’ve got a place to sit down with a cup of tea.

December Reflections 6: best book of 2018

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It’s been another year of ‘reading what I happen to feel like reading‘, an approach which I recommend. Ceasing to feel guilty about the books that I have or haven’t read has been one of the best decisions of my life. Before I set off on my InterRail trip, I asked people to recommend me books that they had enjoyed, and then loaded up my e-reader with the results. I also downloaded a lot of free stuff from Project Gutenberg. More recently, I’ve been reading and re-reading books with particularly convincing imaginary locations, for my Reader’s Gazetteer series.

I’m amused to note that my top three this year have strong f/f themes, which in some ways is very representative of my reading habits, and in other ways leaves a lot out. But there we go.

I’ve already written about Heather Rose Jones’ Alpennia series, and why I enjoy it so much. In fact, I have read the three main books twice within the space of this year, a habit which I thought had gone the way of long school holidays. I’ll repeat what I said before –

If I’d written a wishlist of all the tropes and themes that I most enjoy reading, and handed my specifications over to an author, I couldn’t have liked the result better than I like this. The series contains nights at the opera, women in breeches, swashbuckling, politics both national and ecclesiastical, relationships between women, and a sensitive portrayal of religious experience. And a fictional state somewhere in Europe. –

– and add that I’m very grateful to the person who recommended it based on my enthusiasm for The Prisoner of Zenda.

The King of a Rainy Country (Brigid Brophy) is a book that I’ve had on the bookcase for ages (I was almost certainly drawn to the Virago green spine in a charity shop) and hadn’t got around to reading. It turns out to be a wistful, regretful, funny novel with moments of sheer beauty, in which a young woman drags the young man she isn’t really in a relationship with around Italy in search of the girl she had a (reciprocated) crush on at school.

But I think my favourite book of 2018 was Passing Strange by Ellen Klages. It was one of the ‘InterRail recommendations’ acquisitions – in fact, one friend recommended it, and another chipped in to say how much they had liked it. This was a short book based in San Francisco in 1940, with a convincing evocation of the lesbian scene, and magic applied with a very light hand. I loved it.

My least favourite book, incidentally, was The Way We Live Now, in which I hated everybody except the American adventuress, and was horrified by the anti-semitism. I only kept reading to see who was going to end up marrying whom.

December Reflections 5: five things about me

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  1. I read a lot, and I own a lot of books that I’ve never read.
  2. I don’t drive, and am perfectly content with that state of affairs.
  3. I enjoy using clothes and accessories to explore and express my identity.
  4. I am easily brought down by pessimism, and find it useful to set up good things for the future.
  5. I like travelling. I don’t go far off the beaten track, but I follow it at my own pace, and on my own, or with only one or two companions.

December Reflections 4: best decision in 2018

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I spent much of the summer and autumn of 2018 wondering, Now what? I’d been on my epic adventure. I’d launched my new book. Now what? I was ready for the next big thing, but the big things were just too big, and they hovered infuriatingly just out of reach. (They still are, though I’m gathering boxes to stand on.)

At a church ‘praying with art’ event, I happened to mention that I was in the middle of a transition, and that I didn’t really know what it was. I’d been looking at The Visitation by Sebastiano del Piombo, and been very struck by the way that the two women’s faces and Mary’s right arm make a heart shape, and by all the bustling going on in the background. It’s a painting about transitions. Now what?

A couple of months later, the curate suggested that I might be interested in Cursillo. I heard ‘Casio’, like the calculators; when she spelt it out to me and explained that it was Spanish, it immediately felt like a good thing. Three days of talks and discussion groups, with the Eucharist every day. As I looked into it more, and discovered that much of the imagery came from pilgrimage, it felt like a good thing that might fit into the same place as the Camino de Santiago. I got my form filled in and returned with, for me, unprecedented speed.

The weekend is difficult to describe. (There’s a perception that one isn’t meant to describe it, which I think could be a little off-putting; certainly I appreciated having been given an outline of the way it works, and told ‘not to expect a retreat’.) It was what I was expecting, but it was more than what I was expecting. I knew that there would be talks and discussion groups; I knew that I would have to work quite hard to find myself spaces of time where I could be alone and quiet; I did not know that there would be rainbows and butterflies and a pervasive sense of joy.

I think that what it did for me was to bring out all my awkward bits, and bless them. I have a lot of awkward bits. (Probably most people do.) Most of them came up in discussion. My queerness, and my brain (both my insistence on using it, and when it refuses to work), and my extensive experience of burnout, and my unfashionable opinions on marriage. It has often been lonely being me, being Christian. I’ve had to work a lot of things out on my own. So I spent Friday and Saturday thinking that I’d heard it all before, and Sunday crying, because I’d been heard. On Saturday night I really wanted a hug, and on Sunday I got dozens. I felt as if I’d been taken apart and cleaned and put back together again.

It was only a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still working through everything that came up. (And quite often that’s meant “ignoring everything that came up, while I catch up on sleep”.) But it’s been good for me, and I think it will go on being so.

December Reflections 3: orange

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I bought myself a Playmobil Advent calendar this year, because – I’d had it on my wishlist for ages – and things like this didn’t exist when I was eight – and I wouldn’t have had one even if they had – and it was a fiver cheaper than the last time I looked – and I’m thirty-three and I have a job that pays me money and I can buy frivolous things if I feel like it.

And then it came to Advent, and I opened the first two doors, and put the princess together, and the sledge, and immediately felt massively guilty because – I had bought things I don’t need – and where was I going to put it? – and we have a house inspection on Saturday – and what am I, eight? – and little bits of plastic that will get lost and trodden on.

Then I remembered that sitting in my desk tidy there was this little orange-haired Playmobil doll. I found her on the pavement outside the council offices in Woking years ago, with her broken feet and her scraped face, and picked her up and took her home with me. I hadn’t the heart to throw her away, and I wasn’t sure if anyone else would want her, so she’d been sitting in my desk tidy ever since.

I put her on the sledge, and immediately felt better about the whole thing.

This story doesn’t have a moral. It’s just a picture of the way my head works at the moment: a mixture of guilt and whimsy and sentimentality; of playfulness and prudence and extravagance; of self-consciousness and a resolute refusal to give a damn what anyone else thinks anyway. It says as much about me as anything, I suppose.

December Reflections 2: favourite photo of 2018

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(What happened to December Reflections 1? You can see the picture here. But I’m using this prompt series as part of my Advent practice, and Advent only started today.)

I left on my InterRail adventure in the middle of April, which this year followed up the snowpocalypse of March with two solid weeks of grey dreariness, and all the trees stayed bare. The first day took me from London to Hamburg, which is about as far as one can comfortably get in a day. I had to change in Brussels, then Welkenraedt, then Aachen, and then finally Düsseldorf on the way.

I’d got it all planned – and, as my plan came to pass, I became increasingly confident. I was not worried about the Eurostar. I felt a bit nervous about the Belgian trains, but after I’d boarded and alighted from two I was beginning to feel as if I could do this. There were young green leaves on the trees in Belgium, too.

And the timetable worked out in such a way that I had a choice of trains at Aachen. I’d originally envisaged myself pushing right on through to Hamburg as fast as possible, but then I thought it would be a pity not to see where Charlemagne was crowned, and so I decided that I could be brave. I could be spontaneous. I could change my plans.

I talked a bit of German. I worked out the left luggage locker. And I hot-footed it across Aachen to the cathedral.

And outside Aachen cathedral was this glorious magnolia tree, in full bloom. It was as if my long-delayed spring had come to me all at once – except that I’d gone to find it.

December Reflections 13: soundtrack of 2016

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These were the last three CDs I bought. They’re part of the soundtrack of 2016, but not all of it. Abba, Taylor Swift, Billy Joel… I saw Billy Joel live this year, a Christmas present from my middle brother, and a fantastic night. (It clashed with the Last Night of the Proms. Billy Joel played Rule Britannia, whence he found his way to Ode to Joy and finally into My Life. It was epic.)

What’s missing? Things I’ve sung, for a start. With work choir, Take That’s Shine; Katrina and the Waves’ Walking on Sunshine; David Bowie’s Life on Mars?; a song called Together we are strong by our conductor.The biggest audience of my life was at national delegate conference in June. I have no way of knowing numbers, but it would have been somewhere between five hundred and fifteen hundred. A lot of people, anyway.

For church choir, Elgar’s Ave Maris Stella; Rubbra’s Missa Sant’ Dominici; Poulenc’s Quem vidistis pastores; Howells’ Magnificat in G (we haven’t got to the Nunc Dimittis yet)… the most difficult ones turn out to be the most memorable, though I would be hard put to it to hum some of them. My one solo this year was in the quartet in Stanford’s Te Deum in B flat.

I was aiming to find a reliable top F and top G this year, but haven’t managed that. That’s a goal for 2017. I continue to try to teach myself the piano. Drink to me only with thine eyes and The Rose of Tralee have been much heard around these parts, very slowly and with some swearing.

As always, I get to know music best from the inside; if I can play something, if I can sing it, I can appreciate it, far more easily than if I just listen.

Winter Days: postscript

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There is one thing missing, and that is my word for the year.

Nobody asked – it didn’t come up in Reverb – and so I was going to do without a particular word-for-the-year this year. However, there is one particular word that has been jumping up and down screaming at me to notice it. I have come across it in all sorts of contexts, and every time I do it leaps off the page, or the screen, or whatever it is.

It’s kind.

This is terrifying me in much the same way as generosity did earlier in this series, on account of being knackered. Compassion fatigue. And yet I know it’s not actually about that at all. Kindness costs nothing, indeed, particularly if I make it important to be kind to myself as well. And I remember 2013, when my word was love, how it all came in, how I found that I had already been swimming in the stuff. If kindness works the same way… yes.

I note that they seem to appear as adjectives rather than the associated nouns. Last year it was free, not freedom; this year it’s kind, more than kindness.

This year, then, is to be kind in, to be kind to others and to be kind to myself, to let kindness happen to me. Bring it on.