My town bike is waiting for a pair of new tyres so I had to take the cargo bike to the station this morning. Now, the cargo bike is a tank, as bikes go, it’s long and heavy, but it also has an electric motor so getting it up the hill is rather less of an effort than getting a Pendleton Somersby up there on pure pedal power. I appreciated that this morning: it’s wet, so I zipped my jacket up, but it’s not all that cold, so I’d have been uncomfortably hot by the time I got to the top if I’d been doing it unassisted.
Anyway, the bit I really enjoyed was going down the other side. There was no other traffic, it wasn’t wet enough to impede my vision, and the wind and the rain on my face were exhilarating. I once read somewhere that cycling may be the closest most of us get to knowing what it’s like to fly (as opposed to being flown, I mean). It certainly felt like that this morning.
All through June and July and August, every Sunday afternoon that we weren’t doing anything else, we’ve gone down to the riverside to hear the brass band playing at the bandstand. Brass bands plural, rather; it’s a different group every week, coming in from the towns and villages all around. One thinks of brass as a Northern, industrial thing, but the council or whoever organises this doesn’t seem to have any trouble filling the schedule. Round here I suspect it’s more of a military, or legacy-military thing, or simply an enjoying-making-music thing.
It’s a lovely way to spend an afternoon, lazing under the trees, listening to live music, with the toddler running between our spot and the play area. In fact, it’s the one sort of concert where I feel really confident bringing a toddler. Maybe we send someone along the riverbank to the ice cream van.
It’s a brilliant community thing. The audience is always a mixture of friends of the band, regulars (their numbers growing through the summer as more and more people catch on) and passers-by. Last week we got there slightly late and found that our next door neighbours, plus extended family, had set up just in front of our usual spot. Yesterday there was one of the nursery families, who’d really just come for the slide and been pleasantly surprised by the music.
I say brass bands. Most of them were: some called themselves jazz orchestras or swing orchestras, but either way, there was a lot of brass involved. There has to be, really, if you want to make yourself heard outdoors with minimal amplification (any singers will get a mic, likewise the bass guitar if there is one, obviously, but that’s about as far as it goes).
Anyway, there’s a wide, if predictable, repertoire. There’s the jazz and the swing, obviously, and when it was one of the less specialist groups you could generally bet on the programme including: some show tunes, probably in medley form, a military march or two, some film music, TV themes (I know I’ve played that Star Trek compilation at some Saturday morning youth music scheme, a decade and a half before I saw any Trek, and I played cello; there must have been a version for full orchestra), a hymn, and some classic rock. It is extremely accessible, and that is entirely appropriate for the time and place. On Sunday I was standing next the climbing frame, alternately offering encouragement and singing along with The Teddy Bears’ Picnic (and getting a little thrown by the repeats not coming where I expected them).
It’s been hot, and dry (you may have noticed). Most weeks, the audience must have been hard to spot from the bandstand, hiding under trees or any other patch of shade. The grass got progressively more parched. The musicians generally took their jackets off. The willow trees stayed green, but there was a depressing expanse of yellow between us and them, and the sky was aggressively blue. This was about the only bearable outdoor activity. Abide with me, the band played a couple of weeks ago, fast falls the eventide, in glaring sunshine. Mind you, up the hill at the cathedral Evensong would just have started.
As the summer wore on, we evolved more and more elaborate seating arrangements (we are, I should say, by no means the only people with folding chairs and a festival trolley). Sometimes I brought a flask of tea; occasionally, a cake from the market; often, a punnet of strawberries. Somebody always has a better-looking picnic: full marks to the people the other week who’d fixed themselves up with a cream tea complete with fizz. My own Glyndebourne-level aspirations will have to wait another year.
Because it’s over. This Sunday was the last concert of the year. It was a bit of a toss-up whether we’d make it, having been away the night before. I’m glad we did. It was the right way to round out August. One last trip to the ice cream van. Some absolute bangers (technical term). A late, blessed, prolonged soaking has turned the grass green again. Towering grey clouds hint at more if we’re lucky. The folding chairs are back in the garage. The Lord’s My Shepherd (tune: Crimond), always imbued for me with a slightly beery, teary nostalgia, is lingering in my head, but the last tuba player has packed up and gone home.
I probably packed too much into this summer. Two arts festivals, one convention, three counties, two concerts, two talks, one opera patched together from at least six others, fourteen train journeys, goodness knows how many bus journeys, more stuff than would fit in a decently sized Kia, two passenger ferry crossings. Four scheduled family get-togethers, ranging from two people to fourteen.
Two worlds, for goodness’ sake: the flat one on the back of four elephants on the back of a turtle, and the regular round one. Three centuries, although we seemed to keep skipping over the middle one. Potty training. More dead relations than I’d been expecting. My birthday. That weird thing that time does on the Isle of Wight. Emotions, loads of them.
Specifically, all of that somehow folded up and fitted into three weeks, and now I’ve written it down I’m thinking it’s not surprising I’ve been absolutely shattered ever since we got home from the Discworld Convention. Yes, there is certainly a school of thought that says summer holidays ought to be relaxing, but it is fair to admit that this one wasn’t, really. Although I’d go back and do it all over again.
Two festivals and a convention
Music in the Burnhams. Ventnor Fringe. The International Discworld Convention. The two festivals overlapped – that is, the week that was Music in the Burnhams sat neatly within the ten days that was Ventnor Fringe. At least I’d booked the whole lot as annual leave early in the year. Then we had a couple of days of actual seaside holiday, with intervals of Removing Stuff From My Late Mother’s House, and a week at home before DWCon.
Two concerts, two talks
I’d have liked to have got to more. I’d have liked to hear every single piece of Julius Benedict’s music on the whole week-long programme. But aside from the scheduling, there was travel and childcare to contend with, and what I got was two talks by the world Benedict expert (I didn’t know there was a world Benedict expert! but I am very pleased to have found there is, and to have met him and been enthusiastic) followed by two lunchtime concerts in the Burnhams, and the offer of a ticket at Fringe that I couldn’t realistically take up.
But my word, those two were quite something. By virtue of being the featured composer’s great-great-great-granddaughter, I had front row seats. That gave me a very good view of some extremely good musicians playing some fiendishly difficult music. It always takes me several repetitions to get my head around a piece of music, to have any coherent reaction beyond ‘Wow’ or ‘What?’, and until I get to hear these again I’ll be stuck on ‘Wow’ (and also ‘How?’).
And then there was the rather overwhelming awareness of the fact that I am in the church where Nelson was baptised, listening to music that has not been heard by an audience in one hundred and fifty years, written by my great-great-great-grandfather, who I feel as if I am just beginning to get to know, wishing my parents could have been here to hear this too.
Slow travel
My father would very much have approved of my second day at the Burnhams in particular. I took an early train to King’s Lynn, then rode on the top of a bus that headed for the coast at Hunstanton, sat there for a while to get its breath back, and then traced the coastline. I watched the architecture change from red brick filled in with yellow brick to red brick filled in with flint; lamented dried-up duckponds; boggled at a Fat Face shop apparently in the middle of nowhere. Sat outside a rather chi-chi Italian deli and drank a cup of coffee and watched the world go by. Learned more about The Lily of Killarney – and once again regretted the fact that there was an almost-complete recording on vinyl in 1968 and Pa apparently never knew about it.
Then – and this was more something that other members of my family would appreciate – I rode my little orange folding bike from the talk venue to the concert venue, up and down a single-track lane that dissolved into sand at the verges.
As for the other journeys, well, I’ve taken many trains to Portsmouth and many ferries on to the Isle of Wight. I will say here, though, that it continues to be worth the extra twenty minutes or whatever it is to take the Thameslink through London, change at East Croydon or Three Bridges (you could change at Gatwick Airport, but I wouldn’t) and bumble gently along the Southern line to Arundel and Chichester. There are two reasons: firstly, avoiding the Underground, particularly with a three-year-old, is always a good thing; and secondly, Arundel is just ridiculously beautiful with its spires and turrets set against the South Downs.
Island time
Island time is slow time, and Ventnor time is basically geological. It’s because there’s so much geology around there. I have no idea how the Fringe organisers manage to make the shows start on time. Maybe they don’t. I made it to precisely one show this year, and I was late to that. Anyway, it was good. Weird, and sad, because it’s been weird every year since 2020 and sad every year since 2022, but good. We hung around at the Book Bus, and we hung around at the bandstand, and we got some executor stuff talked about, and I’ll be glad when we don’t have to talk about executor stuff any more, but I’ll also be glad to come back to Ventnor.
What worked
I bought a pair of Loop earplugs on something of a whim ahead of the convention, wore them at dinner with a portion of my extended family at a notoriously loud restaurant, and was an instant convert. Of course, just because I could suddenly hear them didn’t help with anybody else hearing anything else, but it was lovely to see them all.
Other things I was glad I brought to the convention: peppermint teabags; a very large bag of (mostly) shelf-stable snacks; my adorable toucan butter knife; Compeed blister plasters; safety pins.
But in Ankh-Morpork…
I married into Discworld fandom, and, you know, as in-laws go, it’s great. Interesting and amusing people. A chance to apply my English Literature brain, particularly in regard to performance, arts, and stories. The food was a bit of a disaster, but I had prepared snackegy, and there were enough places within a reasonable driving distance (and we’d brought the car) that we didn’t go hungry. But the main point of the event so far as this household was concerned was to see my husband sing two and a half Mozart arias in character as Casununda the amorous dwarf (or, in his case, to actually do this, obviously), and this went extremely well. There was a small exclamation of “That’s my daddy!” from the audience but happily this only reinforces the characterisation.
And that wound things up in a surreal but really rather appropriate manner. Summer for me is for the performing arts and for family, and if that expresses itself in the form of my beloved spouse singing Here in Ankh-Morpork my target is eight – ahem – seven plus one!, very carefully not putting any weight on a disreputable wooden stepladder, well, why not?
Three years ago, almost exactly, I went to see Opera della Luna’s Sweeney Todd:
– subtitled The Victorian Melodrama, and sub-subtitled NOT the musical by Stephen Sondheim (Opera della Luna). This took the script of the original 1847 production and added – as seems to have been consistent with period practice – background music from a small orchestra. The music came from various (higher-brow) composers of the era, including my great-great-great-grandfather Julius Benedict. Hence our going to see it: I may never hear Benedict’s music performed live by professionals again.
Which just goes to show how much I know. For all my life, Benedict has been languishing in obscurity, my distinguished ancestor nobody’s ever heard of. I mean, I was fairly thrilled the other month to find a copy of Weber in London, which quotes Benedict’s rather gloomy write-up of his teacher’s last concert, in a National Trust second-hand bookshop. One takes what one can get.
But recently I learned – thanks to my husband happening to have Radio 3 on at just the right moment – that a music festival in Norfolk will very much be featuring Benedict’s music performed live by professionals. And not just as incidental music that I won’t actually be able to recognise. As the main event.
I am very sad that my father did not live to see this, because he would have been even more thrilled than I am.
I am a little frustrated that my circumstances are such that I cannot go to all fourteen events.
I am doing my homework, listening to the recordings I have, reading the books I have.
I am wondering if – hoping that – this is just the beginning, that Benedict is going to be the newly rediscovered unjustly forgotten composer of the moment. I am trusting that I won’t need to regret the ten events I can’t get to, because I will no longer have to worry about this being my only chance to hear his work.
Apart from anything else, it’s lovely. Here, have his piano concerto in C minor:
I can’t remember where I read that. Somewhere, presumably, in the small pool of books I’ve swum through in the last few years. Something about life with a very small child. Maybe one of the parenting ones, but it feels a little too generalised, too cheesy. True, though. The days are long. Yesterday I went to bed at nine o’clock to stop the day getting any longer, though admittedly yesterday wasn’t really the child’s fault.
The years? I don’t know. The last two-and-three-quarter years actually feel like they’ve lasted quite a long time, but they’re part of a six year stretch that seems to have been working on a different calendar entirely. That said, I’m not sure how I’m forty, or how I’ve suddenly been working for the same organisation for fifteen years.
What I really notice, though, are the weeks. Now we’re in a routine where many things happen once, and only once, a week, it’s amazing how they fly by. Rhyme Time again? Well, yes, it’s Friday. I suppose it does feel like quite a long time since Friday, but even so. And then you miss one Rhyme Time, go to the next two, are away for the one after that, and then fail to get out of the door for the last one, and there’s a month gone. And again, the weeks feel like they last forever as they’re happening, but they’re gone just like that. Work deadlines rear up at me out of the darkness. Lent just didn’t seem to happen and suddenly it’s half-way through April and we’re well into Easter season.
My evenings, too, I’ve set aside for particular things, in the hope that I’ll get at least something done. Monday for making, Friday for mending. Tuesday for writing (no, collapsing into bed at 9pm did not allow me to write anything, but I’m feeling better for it today). Saturday for keeping in touch with people. Wednesday for whatever I feel like. The weeks go fast and I get very little done in them. And that’s just the way it is.
I can see it happening, the days I take the train to London. One week I’m waking up in the dark, turning my bike lights on before I cycle to the station, ten minutes into the train journey before the sun comes up over frosty fens. Next week, the sky’s beginning to get light in the east as I huff my way up the hill. The clocks go forward, and we’re back to square one, but not quite. A week later, I’m watching the sunrise from a bench. A week after that, my daylight-powered motivation is sufficiently recharged for me to get out of the door half an hour earlier (you know you’re early when you meet the Cambridge University women’s rowing team coming out of the station on your way in). Another week, and I don’t need the bike lights. And every time, the sunrise is swinging further and further round to the north, and a week is just the right gap to make it really obvious. In a very beautiful way, though.
Which leaves me – where? Somewhere in the middle of a world that seems to be spinning very fast. Perhaps I just need to let it. There’s nothing I can do about the sunrise. Perhaps all I need to do is notice it, enjoy it, slow time back down by not trying to make the best use of it, whatever that even would have been.
It snowed overnight! We don’t get much of it round here; in fact, it’s been almost exactly a year. So either the perpetrator of this mild act of vandalism is keeping the full twelve days of Christmas, or else someone’s driven in quite a long way without clearing their back windscreen.
Anyway, this time last year we had a pathetic little dusting of snow, and I was in bed, in a good deal of pain and unable to keep any food down, as the leftover gas from my gallbladder removal surgery fought its way around my abdomen. (What sorted it out, for anyone in similar straits, was a little pill called Wind-eze. The packet wasn’t very clear on how it works, but it does.) Today, by contrast, I was able to walk across town in my Wellington boots, stopping at the cathedral to walk the labyrinth (still in wellies – that’s a first!) and eat the last cherry cream choux bun in Caffè Nero. So, contrary to my gloomy posts of the last month, I can and do get better.
I’m still ill. Three weeks, now; in fact, a little more. The really obnoxious symptoms have gone, but if I do just a little too much I find getting out of bed the next day very difficult indeed.
So today I sampled the solstice daylight from the door and then retired, so far as I could, to the sofa. The choir sang O Oriens at Evensong, though I didn’t hear it. Once again, it’s not really how I’d have liked to mark the solstice, but it feels oddly appropriate. And if it feels particularly dark this year – well, it was a new moon yesterday, so maybe it was.
Yesterday we went out to a stately home. There was a choir (OK but not great) singing Christmas carols outside the café, and in the chapel there were volunteers leading any visitors who cared to join in (and most seemed to) in more carols. Yesterday would have been my mother’s birthday. She would have enjoyed nitpicking the choir’s performance, and she always went carol singing on her birthday if she could. I cried, but I was so glad to have done it.
O Oriens. O morning star. O radiant dawn. Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. A whole chunk of morning prayer unexpectedly brightening the evening.
My moon app tells me it’s a waxing crescent, 3% illuminated. Of course it’s not visible in the night time at all, and even if it were, it’s tipping it down out there. Nevertheless, despite all appearances, it might be possible that things are already getting better.
If I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake, I suppose I can blame this lingering lurgy. It’s been two weeks and I’m still lethargic and very conscious that I’m not yet well. I’m better, I think, than I was on Advent Sunday, when I was cold and wobbly and wondering what on earth was wrong with me; certainly better than last Friday, or this Monday; but still not entirely well.
Some friends observed recently that in these days of antibiotics and painkillers (both undoubted benefits to the world at large, let me be clear) we’re stumped by minor illnesses whose symptoms persist. I couldn’t take antibiotics for a cold, and, while I was glad enough of paracetamol and pseudephedrine when my head and ears were aching and I couldn’t breathe without thinking about it, there’s been nothing to be done with the fatigue. Except, of course, waiting. A hundred years ago that would just have been the way things were. You’d have to give your immune system time to do its job, you wouldn’t be able to dose yourself up and power on through.
This year I’ve been reading, very slowly, Kathleen Norris’s The Noonday Demon, in which she examines the cardinal sin/bad thought (depending on which theologians you ask) of acedia. This concept has some overlap with the clinical condition of depression, and is often translated as ‘despair’, but, Norris seems to argue, is perhaps best interpreted as the desire to be somewhere other than where you are. This resonated, often when the toddler just wouldn’t go to sleep, but at other times too.
And recently I picked up Ross Thompson’s Spirituality in Season, in which he talks about three kinds of ‘abyss’, or exclusion:
First, there is exclusion from God, which because God embraces us always, can only be self-wrought; this is sin, leading to hell. Second, there is exclusion from life and being, which by definition is death. And third there is exclusion of our fellow human-beings, which in much of the teaching of Jesus… seems to be equated with the judgement; we are already judged, it seems, by our own response to our neighbour in need.
Then he draws a contrast between the two penitential seasons of Lent and Advent, noting that in Lent we actively confront this abyss (because, as he says, it’s all the same thing) while in Advent we ‘vulnerably experience their great danger, before experiencing at Christmas the one who saves us’.
And then he goes on to talk about waiting, using the example of waiting for a bus. We wait for something (or someone) over whose arrival we have no control at all.
(Here, I would add, we have two options: we can watch, or we can seek distraction. I’m very conscious that lately – the last few months, maybe longer – I’ve been seeking distraction. I’ve been very reluctant to face the inside of my own head, or heart. Too tired. And it’s going to hurt. Maybe. That might or might not be what’s going on. I need to look at that too.)
I read this… in November, if not October. I gleaned some useful facts for my O Antiphons workshop. I noted the reference to W. H. Vanstone’s writing on passivity in the events of Holy Week, which I have also read, and found useful.
And then I spent the first ten days of Advent absolutely hating where I was, furious that I didn’t have the energy to engage in anything that felt like a meaningful observance. And not being able to prepare for Christmas, the sacred or the secular versions, either.
And then it clicked. Waiting. I’m waiting. I’m waiting to feel better. I have very little control over how my body deals with this illness; even my capacity to do nothing is limited. This is, or could be, more meaningful than any Advent devotional book, could teach me more than any twenty-four windows I could open. This is a particularly immersive way to experience waiting, and, therefore, to observe Advent.
Has it helped? Immensely. If nothing else, laughing at my own failure to get it improved at least a couple of days last week. And not at all. Today, for instance, I wrote, I am losing sight of the concept of anything getting better. (And about three minutes after I wrote that, it did.) But that’s the way it goes. If I’d assimilated this brilliant new insight immediately, discovered how to embrace my enfeebled physical state as a symbol of my mortal human state, and glided up to new heights of spiritual consciousness I’d have missed the point, wouldn’t I?
I always take the first week of December as annual leave, and I always tell people that I don’t plan to do very much with it. Well, not two years ago, when I was on maternity leave, obviously, and last year it was the last week of November, but before that I had a long-standing tradition of taking the first week of December as annual leave, and this year I reinstated it.
The theory is that I get a bit of breathing space with which to start my new year. I observe at least the beginning of Advent in a meaningful way. I take some time to look back at the past year and forward to the next one. I do some writing, perhaps. I get a break from the enforced cheeriness of secular office Christmas (this is less dire than it used to be before the pandemic). I take long walks. I contemplate vast clear skies. And yes, I do a bit of shopping and go to the post office at a time of day when the queue isn’t out the door.
That’s the theory.
I’d forgotten that what actually happens is that I get ill. Whatever stinking cold is making the rounds, the moment I take my early December break, it hits me. Cough, headache, runny nose, nosebleeds, any combination of the above.
This year there’s been an earache and a sticky eye as well. Apparently there’s something absolutely miserable going around, and since it’s lasting a fortnight (so says my neighbour) I probably have another week to go.
(Last year, by way of variation, I was fine during my week off, but then had an unpleasant gallbladder flare-up the week after. The year before that, who knows, I had a five-month-old baby and I can’tremember. The year before that I was pregnant and still in the “constantly exhausted” stage. Before that I might have dodged it with the help of the pandemic restrictions. But before Covid it was definitely a thing.)
I’m particularly annoyed this year because this happened when I took three days off in September, too. But I was tired, and I knew that I was tired. I suppose it’s been a hell of a year, and that’s all there is to it.
So I’m trying to let this be a time of patience, as I suppose is only fitting. If I’m not feeling up to trimming the hearth and setting the table, I can still look east, believing that Love the Guest doesn’t mind the cat hair on the cushions or the toys on the floor. (That carol has been in my head a lot recently; I was meaning to write a post about it. Not this week, though.) I’m trying to accept the experience of being ill, even if I can’t enjoy it, rather than wishing I was somewhere, somebody, else. I’m trying to keep my temper. I’m trying not to worry too much about the next few weeks, and mostly managing it, because I just don’t seem to have the energy.
Next year, then, I might remember that my body seems to need rest as much as my mind needs to process and review. I might make myself a list of things that are gentle and restful but still feel appropriate to the season. I might be prepared for the first week or so to be utter chaos, and to trust that there’s meaning in the chaos too, there’s help for my helplessness, there’s space for everything I need to do, and grace for everything I don’t get to. And this year I’ll try to live that.
We got purple carrots in the veg box this week. If I told you I’d been saving them for Advent I’d be lying: in fact I fancied leek and potato soup on Monday, had a really busy day on Wednesday so just defrosted some tomato sauce and cooked some pasta, thought the broccoli was probably more urgent on Friday, and didn’t cook on the other days. So in fact it’s worked out very appropriately with these magnificent carrots arrayed in deep purple for the solemn season of Advent. Some of them even have stars in the middle, as you see, although these didn’t look as striking after cooking.
It’s St Andrew’s day as well, of course. I did think about that (very slightly) in advance, and cooked a bought salmon en croûte in his honour, and thought of my last church, dedicated, like many others in Cambridge, to the first fisherman-apostle. But it’s been a wearing day at the end of a wearing month, and I don’t quite feel as if I’ve properly got started on Advent yet, or given St Andrew the attention he deserves. Plenty more of Advent to come, of course. St Andrew might have to wait for next year.
Kathleen Jowitt 