Category: life and such

Stir up!

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Apple tree, with a few leaves still on the branches, silhouetted against a cloudy sky. One single apple is caught between a branch and the top of the trellis

Not long after I started taking Advent Sunday as my personal new year, somebody asked me whether I was going to push my end-of-year wrap-ups and preparations forward into November. No, I said, the idea was to take the whole of December (and the first week of January, come to that) to do it at a leisurely pace, and to give me something to do other than getting fruitlessly annoyed by all the commercial-Christmas tat.

Which still holds true. My husband bought me a packet of lebkuchen, which are already in the shops: I love them, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to touch them. Not in November. And yet this year I’ve noticed myself looking forward eagerly to Stir Up Sunday – today – the last Sunday of the Church year, Christ the King in new money – and the making of the pudding. Preparing for the preparation. And I’ve been getting out the recipe books and flicking through things that look tasty, things that look fun, things I’d never normally cook or eat but which might be approached in a spirit of “It’s Christmas”.

I do like a nice recipe book. And I have been reasonably adventurous this year. (Quince, ginger and raisin suet pudding, the other weekend, from Modern Pressure Cooking. Very good.) But I’m not usually this diverted by Christmas food.

It’s partly knowing that I’ll get much less church than in the pre-baby days, and other elements of the festival seem more promising (not that I will have any more opportunity to cook, of course).

It’s partly that this year I know I can eat it without causing myself significant abdominal discomfort. (Last year I had my gallbladder removed on 30 December; from the previous Christmas up until that point, eating anything fatty put me at risk of vomiting and hideous pain.)

It’s partly having stayed, last weekend, at a Premier Inn attached to a Beefeater which was exuberantly and prematurely Christmassy.

It’s partly having led an Advent study day yesterday, based on the O Antiphons (usually encountered 17-23 December), and having been preparing for that for several weeks. (We followed it with Evensong, and used the readings for the Eve of Christ the King. They worked very well.)

It might partly be wanting this year to be over and done with. It’s been intense, and often painful, and it’s gone very fast. So why not wrap it up now?

It might partly be wanting an answer to the question So what do we do about the Christmas pudding, in the absence of our mother, who was always in charge of it? How do we stir it, when none of us is near any of the others?

And this year the answer looked like this: I made the Christmas pudding, out of the recipe book that she always used. Except she always used walnuts where the recipe says almonds, and I didn’t have quite enough walnuts, so I made up the difference with pecans. And I found the last-but-one-apple from our trees. And I sent my brothers a Zoom invitation so that they could observe the stirring.

And now the pudding is steaming away quietly on the hob. It wasn’t remotely the same, of course. But it will do. I might even open the lebkuchen.

Fifteen years

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The legs of a person wearing a black skirt and tights and red shoes with double ankle straps, standing on a grassy lawn in front of a low wall and a blue car
Here’s a picture from 2010. I loved these shoes. But that’s another story.

Earlier today I was on a video call with a new colleague. He asked how long I’d been with our employer. I joined in 2010, I said, started in a regional office, moved to HQ in 2013…

At this point another colleague joined and said, yes, new colleague had been remarking how people either seemed to have joined yesterday or have been around for fifteen years.

Yes, I said, and I’m still wondering when I flipped from the one category into the other, apparently overnight.

Inside, though, I was going, Fifteen years? Really? But yes: the arithmetic is simple, it’s the getting my head around it that’s proving challenging. The anniversary slid past without my noticing a couple of months ago. Somewhere between 2013 and here, I became an old-timer.

Compare the starting point with where I am now, and it’s obvious. I live in a different town, county, region. I look very different – my hair’s gone almost completely white. Come to think of it, I started 2010 with barely any eyebrows, having pulled them out in a bad mental health patch.

I started 2010 as a depressed temp, the confidence knocked out of me by failing to get a job I’d been doing for several months, equally scared of giving myself time to breathe and of finishing any piece of work lest there be nothing more for me to do. It took me a long time to find my feet in the union world. In some ways it seemed like the job I’d been born to do, if only I’d known it existed before, working to change the world for the better every day. In others, I felt like a fraud: too shy, too introverted, too posh, too cynical, too everything, or possibly not everything enough. These days I know what I’m good at, I can see how it serves the movement, and I mostly get to do that.

Things change gradually. Even the big changes – office, job title, team, grade – took a while for me to grow into them. There are a few days that stand out in my memory as having moved me forwards significantly, but so much of it was just turning up, and doing the job, and doing the job, and doing the job day after day, and eventually realising that actually I was pretty good at it.

Outside work, too, things changed gradually. Three books, with a couple of pages written per day, and not every day at that; gradually working up the nerve to put them out into the world myself. Getting confident cycling, first on a trike and then on a bike. Buying a house; having a baby; losing both parents: big changes, those, but again, you get used to them gradually, day by day, living in the new world until you’re at home there. Second chances (there were plenty of jobs I didn’t get); another dance with vocation, parting on better terms this time round. It’s quite a lot, really; when I stop and think about it I’m not so surprised that it’s taken fifteen years to get here.

If I could go back to 2010, if I thought 2010-me would believe me, I’d tell her… Hang in there. It works out better than you could possibly imagine.

But I don’t need to. Because she did.

Lockdown in the orchard

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A white and black cat sleeps on a stone floor under a full length banner showing Sir Isaac Newton

We visited Isaac Newton’s apple tree a couple of weeks ago. It’s in the orchard of his childhood home, Woolsthorpe Manor, a couple of miles off what’s now the A1, the Great North Road. These days it’s a couple of hours’ drive from Cambridge (we started a little further north than that). It would have taken considerably longer in Newton’s day; nevertheless, he made the journey.

Woolsthorpe is a lovely place. It’s in the care of the National Trust now, and they’ve managed to find a satisfying balance between hands-on science and palpable history. The volunteers (apparently there is no shortage) are a mixture of enthusiastic students and gentle retirees.  It’s not exactly quiet – it couldn’t be, with children spinning balls down funnels and laughing at distorting mirrors and all the rest of it – but it feels extraordinarily peaceful. You wouldn’t think there were lorries hurtling north and south just over there. This cat was snoozing away happily in the café; later we saw it touring the yard, seeking homage from the other patrons.

I hadn’t twigged that the reason that Newton was sitting under an apple tree at his family home in the first place was that the University of Cambridge had been closed. If I’d known the year – 1665, see if you’re faster than me – I’d probably have made the connection. Bubonic plague. He was self-isolating, we might say now. Lucky to be able to do so, of course. I was conscious of a fellow-feeling: I too ended up leaving Cambridge to find a garden of fruit trees when our epidemic struck, although that was March, not apple season, and that was just the way things worked out for us.

Newton’s Cambridge was different from mine, too. He’d still be able to find his way around the city centre, and no doubt he’d be fascinated by much of what has appeared since his time. He wouldn’t have encountered tourists, or the Silicon Fenizens. It would have been much smaller, less crowded, but still a heck of a culture shock after Woolsthorpe.

And it’s interesting, isn’t it, how that massive breakthrough struck not in the intellectual ferment of the university, but in the peace of the orchard. There’s something to be said for not being where the action is.

As well as these things can go

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A family of swan and cygnets on a small spit in a river in an urban environment
Meanwhile, across the water from the memorial gathering…

“I hope the funeral goes well,” several people said to me, and many of them added, “or as well as these things can go.”

I very much appreciated the sentiment behind that wish. And I knew exactly what they meant.

And yet. And yet it didn’t quite sit right with me, as if there was somehow an implication that because a funeral is necessarily a sad event, there would be things that would not go well. That things would go wrong, even. That because it wasn’t a joyous occasion it must necessarily be somehow slipshod, drab. That difficult and sloppy sit near each other on the same axis.

I don’t believe for a moment that anyone who used that phrase to me meant to imply any of that, of course I don’t. But this kept worrying away at me until I prodded it back.

I’ve been involved in planning all sorts of events – in my professional life, in my voluntary roles, and in my personal life. Courses, parties, retreats, church services, training days, conferences, seminars, weddings.

And yes, funerals.

I can make an event go really well. My mother’s funeral? You bet I was going to do everything I could to make that one go as well as it possibly could.

It went really well – yes, as well as it could. But better than that. Both parts – the “she didn’t want a fuss” church service and crematorium committal, and the “but more people want to pay their respects than will fit in the church” arts centre gathering the next day.

And it was really, really hard. I was very glad, in retrospect, that I didn’t put myself forward to do any reading or give any tribute at the church service, because that gave me space to fall apart completely. I’d done the work of remembering which hymn my mother wanted (yes, I found myself saying to several people afterwards, she specifically wanted the verse about the worms) and guessing which other one she might have liked, of suggesting the readings, of burrowing in the boxes of CDs in the garage to find the Bruckner Te Deum, of liasing with my brothers and the minister and my aunt, of typesetting the order of service and getting it printed. I’d done all that, and now all I had to do was to turn up. The minister carried it, and the liturgy, and my brilliant family who will absolutely sing in four-part harmony if you give them the sheet music.

The next day I was the one at the front of the room, explaining what was going to happen, introducing the musicians, finding a graceful way to bring in someone who’d arrived late but still wanted to say something. Holding the space. I remember thinking at one point that I had my work head on, because that’s what I do.

And that was hard, too. I will probably never be able to listen to Here comes the sun again, maybe never sing Auld Lang Syne.

Some things went wrong, of course. I’d have liked to have got to the church earlier and had some time on my own (as opposed to having a flaming row over a sandwich and having to spend far longer than necessary putting my make-up on and calming down). I’d have liked to have the Brahms run all the way to the end of the track. And I think the funeral directors had some trouble with the hearse and the very tight little lane, but that wasn’t my responsibility. It wasn’t perfect. But on the whole, it went very well indeed.

But it was hard because it went well. It was hard because it did what it needed to do. It was hard because there’s no way that catharsis is going to be easy. It was hard because it said what it needed to say: This person is gone, and we loved her. We loved her, and this is the last thing we can do for her.

And because it was the last thing we could do for her, we did it as well as we could.

Thank you, friends. It did indeed go as well as these things can go.

A kindness to one’s survivors

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A shallow flood blocks a path that's blocked again by a five bar gate

This week I’ve been transferring photos from my phone onto an external drive. I’ve had this phone for nearly five years, and there are a lot of photos on there. Fewer than there were on Monday, though.

As luck would have it, I hit January 2022 just as some online friends were discussing preferences for funeral music. My father died on 8 January 2022, and the pictures from that month are a jumble of memories and plans – beloved objects, photos of photos, and important documents – some taken by me, some shared by family members and friends.

Among those important documents was a two page note in my aunt’s handwriting, a summary of a conversation she and Pa had had during a COVID lockdown. On the first page were the details of the solicitors and the insurance. On the second, a very detailed list of funeral preferences. What. Where. Who should speak. Which hymns, including specific tune in one case and hymn number in another. Music for entrance. Music for exit.

It was immensely helpful. I ended up drafting most of the service, and this document gave me a starting point and an authority; it curtailed, if it didn’t quite avoid, a lot of disagreements; it provided some interesting challenges. We didn’t follow it exactly; we also found a previous version (another photo to pop up in the January 2022 folder) and added some bits from that. But we definitely followed it in spirit.

I have made one of these myself, but it was a good decade ago and I think it’s got lost, anyway. So I’m planning to do a new version this year. I’m not planning on dying any time soon, but you never know.

Morbid? Perhaps. Self-centred? Undoubtedly, but far more helpful than being self-effacing. Even if one doesn’t want a big fuss, one’s executors aren’t necessarily going to know what “not a big fuss” looks like, and, while good funeral directors, and, I’m sure, celebrants from all traditions, will have helpful suggestions, they’re going to be at least somewhat generic, at which point you’ve just moved the question on from “what would they have wanted?” to “would they really have wanted that?” And that’s not an easy question when you’re grieving. A plain statement of preferences in black and white can be one last, immensely helpful and comforting, gift. I’d recommend everybody does one, if they can face it, and saves their family and friends a lot of grief, in the informal sense – and perhaps in the formal sense, too.

Twelfth Day

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A Christmas tree from which the red and green fairy lights are being removed

We awoke to find a crust of snow outside; it decayed rapidly over the course of the morning and now it’s disconcertingly mild outside, and raining.

And well, that’s one to the pathetic fallacy, because this Christmas season does feel like a bit of a washout. I’ve spent too much of it feeling ill, worried about making myself ill, preparing for my operation, or feeling wiped out or (damn it) almost as sick as I used to, to have managed festivity for more than about an hour at a time. I missed most of the food, and (which I was looking forward to more) the midnight service. This morning I couldn’t keep my breakfast down and didn’t even feel well enough to watch the livestreamed service for Epiphany; so now I’ve missed that too.

Except, of course, Epiphany is also a season, and it has only just begun. Except, of course, my reflections on recent weeks tell you more about my mood at this moment than about what really happened. Except this morning was better than yesterday and so far my timid attempts at lunch and supper have been successful. Except I have celebrations to look forward to this coming weekend, and in a couple of days I’ll probably feel well enough to get excited about them. Except there were plenty of joyful moments in there, and I just have to trust that I’ll remember them, when I’m feeling a little better. Soon.

Not quite everyday nature

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A partially knitted sock in stripes of white, red, brown, yellow and white/grey on a red plaid

I’ve embarked on one of last year’s Christmas presents, Everyday Nature by Andy Beer. This has a couple of paragraphs for each day, each examining a different natural phenomenon.

This being the week it’s been, I haven’t been able to act on much of it. New Year’s Day, for example, we were encouraged to go out for a nature walk. Not a hope. Today’s entry is on Venus: it’s cloudy.

But never mind. This morning on the bird feeders I saw: bluetits, a robin, a starling, and something that might have been a dunnock. (I am not very good at telling the difference between sparrows and dunnocks.) There were two grey squirrels chasing each other along the back fence. Yesterday there was a wren on the trellis.

This evening I returned to my goldfinch sock (self-striping yarn from West Yorkshire Spinners). Goldfinches were in the book for 2 January: I didn’t see any on Thursday (maybe I’ll get a nyger seed feeder to encourage them) but I can at least enjoy their sense of style.

Prosit Neujahr!

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Christmas tree ornament: cream-painted metal silhouette of a cherub holding a curled horn

I’ve been feeling pretty sore and wiped out today, and the weather’s been horrible: driving rain before lunch, and a cold wind afterwards. In a different year I would have been in Winchester for the Friends of King Alfred Buses running day; in a different state of health I’d at least have been out for a bracing walk. But there’s something to be said for easing into the New Year with what is, after all, just as longstanding a tradition; for galvanising my intention to make some more music this year (and it needs galvanising: I’ve signed up to sing two duets in little more than a week’s time); for taking time to heal; and for letting pleasure and whimsy and beauty come to me. So we watched the New Year’s Concert from Vienna this morning, and this afternoon I crashed out, first in bed and then on the sofa, and I can’t say that I have any complaints at all about how I’ve spent New Year’s Day.

December Reflections 23: hearts

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Two Lebkuchen hearts and one star on a saucer, with a string of red-painted wooden hearts

If I were a character in a video game I’d probably be on about three hearts at the moment. Not at death’s door by any means, but having to be a little bit careful. It’s not the time for swishing around with a sword; it’s time to take things easy, recharge a bit.

In human terms, I’m just at the depressing stage of a cold where I’m despairing of ever feeling better again. Of course, this not being my first cold, I know perfectly well that this is itself a symptom and I’ll probably be fine by Christmas. In the meantime, I need to do as little as I can bear to.

Which is a little frustrating, two days before Christmas. It’s not as frustrating as it might have been, because we decided long ago that trying to do trad Christmas with a dodgy gallbladder and a seventeen month old was a mug’s game, so it’s all coming out of boxes this year. But – breaking news! – my gallbladder is coming out this year! So technically I could cook something nice for New Year.

And I do like the idea – but I don’t seem to have the energy or the enthusiasm to do anything more than flip listlessly through Delia Smith’s Happy Christmas. Maybe I’ll recover some motivation between now and then. Maybe I won’t. In the meantime, Lebkuchen come ready made. One of these days I’d like to try making them myself. Not this year, though.