Stories that make sense
The west front of the cathedral has been hidden behind scaffolding for most of this year. But just this week it’s emerged again, with the porch looking very new and clean. Just in time for next week’s baptism service. (Also, of course, Remembrance Sunday and the Christmas fair, but I’m less interested in those!)
I passed this wall as I walked home this afternoon, and had to stop to take a second look. I could say something about how the temporal and the eternal are all mixed up together. I could say something about having to be willing to let go in order to produce something really spectacular. But actually I just thought it was beautiful.
I’m finding things a little difficult at the moment. No sooner did the baby concede to sitting in a bouncy chair so I could get on with doing things than I slipped getting out of the shower and bashed my knee and had to spend three days in bed and two weeks on the sofa. No sooner did my knee get back to normal than the dark closed in. Still, things are generally not as bad as all that, and all over my home town people are decorating their windows to remind me of it. None more so than this.
Today the sky is very blue and the grass is very green and the sunlight is making everything 25% more beautiful than it was before. And compared to yesterday, which was a day of wind and drizzle, it’s at least 200% more beautiful.
This skirt has a deadline: two weeks and a bit from now. There is still quite a lot of hemming to do, in limited sewing time. It’s very tempting, though, to add more decoration. It’s a question of balance.
Sunset on All Saints’ Day, and I find myself singing The golden evening brightens in the west. Although this year We feebly struggle/ They in glory shine seems more like where I’m at, and apart from all the leaves the photo is saying sempiternal though sodden towards sundown three months early.
I’ve been feeling somewhat adrift from the seasons this year. My calendar emptied out after mid June, and you can never quite believe the weather these days. The garden is running wild with most of the fruit unpicked. Suddenly it’s November. But I got out into the golden evening on All Saints’ Day, and that’s something.
But now I’m in my own house, listening to water dripping off the pram onto the floor. The great advantage is that I know where the kettle is here.
Clocks go back. Not this one, though: it’s not going anywhere, in either direction, until it gets a new battery.
I always used to look forward to the day the clocks go back. I find dark mornings far more difficult than dark evenings. This year, it hadn’t registered in my consciousness in the same way, my schedule being so much less predictable. Ironically, I think it’s going to be helpful in a rather different way, moving all the day’s appointments an hour later while keeping breakfast and dressing the same. We weren’t even late to church this morning.
I think I need to make my posts shorter still. Short enough to type on my phone with one hand while feeding the baby with the other. Like this one.
Whoosh. Suddenly it’s six weeks later and we’re rounding off August with a blue moon. It seemed like a good moment to pick things up again over here.
The baby is delightful, and gets more interesting by the day. It’s lovely, too, seeing others’ reactions. So many people are genuinely pleased to see her, friends and strangers and the guy I know by sight but whose name is a mystery.
We have succeeded in getting out of the house. Several times. There was my birthday; there was Pride; there was the Cursillo study day (labyrinths); there was a barbecue at my aunt’s; there were at least three church services.
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I would say the same thing at times that are not three in the morning. It’s the being on duty all the time.
It’s the first time in years I haven’t been in Ventnor for Fringe week. (I did have a weird feeling last year that It Was All Going To Be Different, though I hadn’t guessed how or why.) I lived it vicariously on the Instagram hashtag.
Hormones. I spent the first month crying about pretty much everything. (Child is not feeding. Child will not stop feeding. Child is small and utterly dependent on me. I wish Pa could have seen her…) Plus, of course, the lack of sleep.
Having my mother to stay. Coke (the fizzy sort). Keeping in touch with other adults over the internet. A sausage-shaped cushion thing that ties on behind my back. Remembering that this is my only job at the moment.
Also, let me stop a moment to extol the Really Useful Boxes. Because they are. Quite apart from storing baby clothes and nappies and toys, I’ve been using them as footstools, for handwashing, and for catching and evicting a huge spider. And the cat likes sitting on them.
A couple of ‘how on earth do I do this motherhood thing’ books: What Mothers Do (especially when it looks like nothing) (Naomi Stadlen); The Gentle Sleep Book (Sarah Ockwell-Smith). Both useful in confirming that I wasn’t missing something obvious, it really is this intense, and there’s only so much you can do before you just decide that this is the way things are and you’re going to go with it; both, I think, pushing back against the Gina Ford school of babyraising (which seems to have fallen out of favour among the professionals, at least in our neck of the woods). Of the two, the Stadlen is the keeper.
The Balloonists: the history of the first aeronauts by L. T. C. Rolt. Rolt was most famously the author of Red for Danger, the absolute classic of disaster analysis. There’s a certain amount of disaster in this (as you’d expect given the quantity of hydrogen used in the early days of ballooning) but it’s by no means the whole story. The whole story is very interesting and engagingly told.
Feeling in need of something trashy I reread Glittering Images (Susan Howatch) and began Glamorous Powers before deciding that really I wanted to read about scandalous bishops more than psychic manpain. So I have abandoned Starbridge and moved on to Lindford (Acts and Omissions, Catherine Fox).
Nothing to speak of in terms of new words on new pages, but I should have some news on an older project soon.
I’m planning a full skirt in olive green with lilypad patches. Need to do some maths and obtain the olive green…
A lot of daytime TV. I’m particularly enjoying The Repair Shop at the moment; I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of years about physical objects and sentimental value, about what things mean and how good it is when something can keep on doing the job it was made to do.
I’ve also returned to Ghosts, and this time managed to get past the second-hand embarrassment of the early episodes and into the kinder, more constructive stories of season 2.
Before that there was the world athletics championships; before that there was the super combined world cycling championships; before that there was the Tour de France.
Pretty cars gathered outside the cathedral. Some gorgeous work by Ely Guild of Woodturners (who, if any of them are reading this, ought all to be charging twice as much for their pieces as they currently do).
Is pretty much impossible with a baby. I did manage to pickle some plums (and regret leaving the jars in the conservatory in the hottest month of the year) and, several weeks after that, make the topping of a crumble.
A lot of ready meals. The charming snackpot that Tony assembles and brings me before he goes to bed and leaves me to the night shift (this evening’s contained two sorts of pretzels, dried apricots, crystallised ginger, a chocolate digestive biscuit, and three Mikado sticks.) And a reuben sandwich at the last (and, for me, only) Foodie Friday market of the year.
A little bit of walking.
Whatever will keep me from falling asleep with a baby on my lap. Minesweeper, mostly.
Dragonflies. Or are they damselflies? I’m not sure what the difference is. Butterflies. Sunflowers. Hollyhocks.
Chaos in the back (it is, infuriatingly, a really good year for fruit, and I’m not managing to get out to pick it, and if I were I wouldn’t get round to doing anything with it). Progress at the front, where we have much less in the way of slate chippings and much more in the way of lavender and thyme.
All the people who have come to see us, sent messages, cards and presents, and generally provided solidarity in a massive life change. The Rosie Birth Centre and the community midwifery team.
Leaving aside all the baby gifts, or we’d be here all night: a lovely turned elm bowl from the woodturners’ exhibition; a couple more Joanie dresses; a whole load of plants (Norfolk Herbs: very reasonable); more fabric patches than I actually needed; some Pride tat.
I haven’t been to the seaside this year other than incidentally, and I’d really like to. I don’t think it’s going to happen, though.
L. T. C. Rolt on the develoment of the dirigible:
Unholy marriages were consummated – most of them only on paper, fortunately – between the balloon, the kite, the ornithopter and the helicopter.
In the conservatory, either on top of a large cardboard box, or on the windowsill for optimum garden surveillance.
How has your summer been? Have you also given up on Twitter, or were you never on it in the first place? What’s your social medium of choice these days?
