Dog-eared in my handbag, polling card
and service sheet lie face to face.
God is gone up. And what a mess
He’s left behind Him. Did He take
all of the world’s compassion, all its love
to shine with ineffectual gleam up there
and leave these few, these twelve-take-one, alone
tiny before this tide of hate and fear
surging around them? Come love, come Lord.
Show us your kingdom come
on earth, as you are
in heaven. Come, Holy Spirit. Come.
Category: Uncategorized
Unexpected Cambridge
I’ve been living in Cambridge for just on a year now. Here are some things I’ve discovered:
1. The wind. People do tell you about the wind, to be fair; it’s just that one can’t comprehend the sheer sideways chilling force of it until one’s been there. ‘Cambridge winds are lazy,’ says my friend Helen. ‘They can’t be bothered going around you. They just go through you.’ I understand that this has been a relatively mild winter; nonetheless, I got caught out last week and had to wait half an hour on the platform at Cambridge station without gloves. Following liberal daily applications of hand cream, my skin is just about returning to normal.
2. You start caring about the Boat Race. This was not a good year to start caring about the Boat Race. Thank goodness for University Challenge, that’s all I can say.
3. You forget all about hills. Hills? What are they again?
4. You get very good at dodging bicycles, tourists with selfie sticks, and people trying to sell you punt trips.
5. You begin to believe that every conceivable object can be transported on a bicycle. Not just the obvious things like kegs of beer or small children. I myself have brought home on the back or the front of my bike a) an orchid in a pot; b) a daylight lamp; c) a herb planter. And I know someone who used to carry a folding bike on his cargo bike, so that he could meet his partner at the station and they could cycle back together. Now that’s love.
Expanding the Comfort Zone
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea of expanding one’s comfort zone from within, as opposed to stepping out of it (useful posts here from Havi Brooks and Jem Bloomfield), in the context of singing – purely because I spend a lot of my spare time doing it.
I estimated a couple of months ago that I’ve averaged two hours of choral singing a week over the past decade. There have, of course, been lighter patches (2007, of which I spent a third in Spain and Germany not singing much at all, and my second and third years at university, when I decided that the need of the serving team was greater than the need of the chapel choir), but they are balanced out by the five years I spent in the choir at Holy Trinity, Guildford. During term time we did two services every Sunday, with a half hour or forty-five minute rehearsal before each one, and an hour’s practice every Thursday. As a result I know a lot of the standard church music repertoire inside out and back to front: if we assume that each piece was sung twice a year, once during a morning service and once at an evensong, then I’ve performed most of them ten times.
I was not at all confident when I joined. All my life I’ve been close to people who have more singing experience than I do and, while they have been nothing but supportive, I’ve always been able to see that their sightreading was better than mine, that they were more confident than I was, that they could hold a line against all comers and I couldn’t. Fortunately, when I joined Holy Trinity, there were plenty of other altos to follow.
I’ve joined two new choirs over the past year, and I’m still singing less than I was at Holy Trinity. They have both proved the expansion of my comfort zone, in very different ways.
The first one was one of the several choirs that run out of my parish church. The workload is considerably less: we sing one, maybe two, services every month, with an hour’s rehearsal beforehand, and a rehearsal on the preceding Friday. This is very much flying by the seat of the pants: a lot of sightreading, and no guarantee that there’ll be anyone else on your part to prop you up.
And that doesn’t scare me any more. Once upon a time I would have been too terrified even to consider joining this choir, but my comfort zone has expanded to encompass this method too.
Granted, some of this is stuff I already know from Holy Trinity. On Easter Sunday I was the only alto at evensong. That was fine: we did Blessed be the God and Father, which I have sung every Easter since 2008. On the other hand, I was the only alto at the previous evensong, and I was sightreading an anthem… I can’t remember what it was, only that I’d never seen it before in my life, and that the alto line contained several top Gs. The very first piece that I did with the new choir was Herbert Howells’ Requiem; that, thank goodness, had rather more rehearsal time dedicated to it.
The other choir is pretty much the complete opposite. In this choir, ten weeks to learn three pieces is presented as a frighteningly tight timescale. This is the workplace choir, set up by the social club and the excellent Workplace Choir Company. Its basic assumption is that nobody has sung anything since they were at school, when they were probably told by a teacher that they couldn’t. This seemed to be about right at my workplace. There was a question early on: who was in a choir already? I was one of perhaps three people who raised their hands. Three out of sixty, and the only one in the first altos.
There was the solo. (But I’ve done solos before, in front of people who would know exactly where I’d gone wrong.) There was the fact that I was doing the solo with a microphone. (That was new territory.) There was the responsibility. At one point the Director of the Executive Office told me, ‘You’re our leader’. I’m not even sure that she was joking. (I have never before in my life been the most experienced member of a large choir.) There was the assuring of everybody that everything was going to be fine.
And somehow I was able to meet it all with a general attitude of ‘Bring it on!’ Solo? Bring it on! Microphone? Bring it on! Teaching a tricky snippet to the rest of my section without reference to a piano? Bring it on! It’s being filmed? Wait, what? Er, bring it on! Thank you, comfort zone, expanding yourself while I wasn’t even looking.
I managed to appear calm through the performance, although it wasn’t until last week, when the high-quality video was made available, that I was able to see whether or not I’d cocked it up. I never know how a solo has gone after the event. I’d like to think that’s because I’m so absorbed in the music that I’ve no space left in my head to remember it, but it’s happened before when I’ve lost a bar in the middle of it.
Anyway, it turns out it wasn’t too bad, all things considered. Here’s the result. I’m the tallest soloist, in the green shirt, singing the alto part in the second verse. Me and my expanded comfort zone.
Getting Around
I’ve been doing a lot of walking these last few days. This is partly because my bike has been in for a service (now reclaimed, complete with a new front mech shifter that actually works!), and partly because I’m planning to walk St James’ Way from Reading to Winchester in July, and I need to get some practice in.
I’ve walked from home to the station; I’ve walked from the station to home. I’ve walked as far round Regent’s Park as I could get in my lunch hour. I’ve walked from town to the station after I’d dropped my bike off, and from home to town to pick it up again.
I’ve been walking. I’ve been cycling. I spent twenty-five agonising minutes on a bus that was progressing down Station Road five metres at a time. I would almost swear that I could feel my blood pressure rising the longer I sat there. Stepping onto that bus, I’d relinquished control and surrendered to the rush hour. Cars are meant to give you control, but of course they don’t. There were plenty of cars stuck in that queue along with me.
I wanted my bike back. That was the reason I’d got on that bus in the first place: I had twenty minutes to get to the repair shop before it closed. I knew that I couldn’t make it on foot. I thought there was just a chance on the bus…
No. Twenty-five minutes of jerking, teeth-grinding, stop-starting creepy-crawling down Station Road and Hills Road. I ran from the bus station, but I didn’t have a hope of making it before the shop shut, and I knew it.
On the bright side, I had an excellent excuse to buy an ice cream and walk home, and it was a glorious evening in which to walk alongside the Cam, over Jesus Green and Midsummer Common, with the college rowing teams hauling themselves down the river and the trees very green with their new leaves.
I love walking. I love the freedom, the chance to turn aside and look properly at things that catch my eye, to go another way entirely. I love the gentle ache in my legs, reminding me that I’ve been out and seen things. I’m less keen on the blister; that’s from wearing the wrong shoes.
I’m so glad I don’t have to sit in that queue every day. I’m so glad I don’t drive. I’m so glad I don’t need to drive. I’m grateful that I’m well enough to walk long distances. I’m thankful for my own pig-headedness and determination that allowed me to relearn how to cycle in my late twenties. I’m glad that I’ve lived in towns and cities with good public transport links.
(And I do like a bus ride. But not in rush hour. Never again in rush hour. Not when I’ve got somewhere to be.)
April Moon: day 12: when the sun and I are in the right place
Cycling south and west, parallel to the river. The first cup of tea of the morning is beginning to kick in, or perhaps it’s just the cool air rushing past me. Swans squatting in the beer garden of the Green Dragon. The morning sunlight drenching the house on the corner of Ferry Lane and Water Street until its pale green paint glows.
It doesn’t happen every day. For three months of the year it’s dark when I ride down Water Street. Sometimes it’s raining. Sometimes it’s cloudy. On the days when the sun and I are in the right place and the right time, though, this is the best part of my day.
April Moon: day 11: permanent święcone
I am trying not to talk about food.
No, that’s not true at all.
I am trying not to talk about food in a certain way, with certain people, but they’re not making it easy.
Recently I cancelled my Graze box, partly because it kept going to someone else’s desk and I found it embarrassing to go and track it down, and partly because they insist on labelling their cake ‘guilt-free’ and filling their covering notes with irritating little screeds about the nutritional superiority of their snacks over anything else I might happen to be eating. I have yet to find a replacement, which is irritating, because if I don’t eat something on the train back from work then I’m a total wreck when I get home.
Once last year I tweeted angrily at Riverford because they included in the box a recipe brochure divided between ‘good’ and ‘naughty’ options – complete with halos and horns. They haven’t repeated the offence so far; I doubt my tweet had anything to do with that, unless perhaps it was echoed by many others. I don’t know. While the parts of the internet that I frequent tend to recognise the value of food, offline I seem to be surrounded by people who assign moral virtue in inverse proportion to nutritional content.
I want no part of this culture of guilt and ingratitude. I need to eat. So does the rest of the human race. Food is good! Food is a blessing! One of the loveliest things about marrying into a part-Polish family is the Holy Saturday ritual of putting together a święconka, a basket of smoked sausage and cake and hard-boiled eggs, and taking it to church to be blessed ready for Easter. It is the most refreshing interlude from the outside world, which is busy beating itself up because it tells itself it has eaten too much, or the wrong thing.
Last year I had a practice of silently giving thanks as I ate – not just for the food itself, but for the labour that prepared it and brought it to me. I’d like to revive that. I would like to live in permanent święcone. I would like to appreciate the food in front of me, rather than tell myself that I don’t deserve it.
Oh, but it would be so much easier if people in the office were not dieting, or, if they were, didn’t feel the need to tell me about it! I keep meaning to make a list of suitable alternative subjects, so that when this particular one comes up I can change it.
April Moon: day 10: portal hub kitchen
The moment I enter the kitchen I feel as if my perspective has been subtly altered. I wake up; I slow down; I remember things I’d forgotten.
Sometimes, of course, I think, ‘oh, sod it, the washing up,’ or even, ‘ooh, tea…’ But it shakes things up.
Because of the slightly unusual layout of our flat, the kitchen is in the middle, between the bedroom at the front and the living room at the back. It’s comparatively dark – its only natural light seeps in from other rooms – but I walk in there from the front and the wash of light from the french windows is a surprise. Going the other way, from the conservatory or the living room into the kitchen, the darkness is soothing, cooling. Entering the kitchen from my study takes me out of my cocoon and back to the world outside.
It’s a hub, a portal. It moves me from darkness to light, and from light to darkness; from work to rest, from sleep to action. Even though neither of us spends very much time in it, it’s the centre of the home.
April Moon: day 9: “oh naughty one, Mayfair”
I immediately feel my body tense up whenever I hear the sound of the telephone.
Who is phoning me? What do they want? Are they going to ask me questions to which I don’t know the answer? Are they trying to sell me something? Ask me for a charity donation? Scam me? Is it family? Bad news? Hassling me for a decision that I haven’t yet made? Wanting to know my plans for August when I haven’t thought beyond May?
Even if it is somebody I want to hear from, the chances are I’m in the middle of cooking my dinner, or eating it. Sometimes, when I’m alone in the house, I let it ring and ring off, and then dial 1471 to find out who it was and whether I want to call them back – in my time, on my terms.
I am glad that I was born into the age of the internet, when communication is moving back towards writing. It’s not so much the fact that it’s written, as that a delay is built in. On email, even over instant messenger (though I have that turned off most of the time, as well), there’s space to breathe between sentences, time to assimilate what I’ve just been told, and room to come up with an appropriate answer. There’s a moral panic that the internet encourages a demand for instant gratification; so far as I’m concerned, it’s got nothing on the telephone.
I like to think that, in centuries to come, our descendants will view the telephone as a quaint artefact of the uncivilised twentieth century. One summoned one’s friends with a bell, and expected them to drop everything and speak to one? How unutterably rude! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must just answer Xanthe’s mind-telegram while I remember. No hurry, though. She knows I’m well; she’ll have seen my neutron update.
April Moon day 8: a small strip of luxury
I wouldn’t call it a collection as such, but I do seem to have a lot of scarves.
I have so many scarves that the other day when I was trying to put one back on the hanger (it’s a device in the shape of a pair of wings, with many holes through which one can stuff the scarves) I pushed a little too hard and the thing snapped in two.
I love scarves. Instant costume. I have one or two faithful favourites that I wear most of the time, some that go with particular garments or outfits, and a few that I almost never wear but which are utterly lovely.
The current faithful is a miracle that I got for a quid in a charity shop. It’s a patchwork of velvet and silk in deep jewel colours – red and orange and olive green and magenta and purple and blue – and goes with everything I own, or at least with everything I’m likely to wear in the winter. Sometimes I wear it with a very short black dress and tuck the ends into a bright pink belt; then I feel like something by Diaghilev. It occupies much the same position as a deep purple damask faux-pashmina that I bought in France when I was seventeen. The black and silver cotton scarf that I inherited from Héloïse.
The warm, winter scarves: the long blue slubby one that deposits fluff on the collar of whichever coat I wear it with. The red-orange circular scarf.
The white shawl that makes my navy blue dress work with my navy-and-white shoes. The pink velvet one embroidered with flowers that only goes with a tiny beige embroidered dress. The red and orange one that was a present from the in-laws and goes beautifully with the little red needlecord smock.
A red and white cotton headscarf patterned with pilgrims on foot and bicycle, which I bought in the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela.
The ones that I hardly ever wear, but that I keep because they are wonderful. An exquisitely fine black lace shawl. The shot-silk pleated green and red one from Hobbs. The hot pink feather boa from my hen night. A white fake-fur stole, lined with satin in a pattern of black and white lozenges, which I made to dress up as Cruella de Vil.
A disguise. A costume. A small strip of luxury.
April Moon day 7: sleep
Sleep.
Sleep.
The sheets so smooth; the duvet so warm; the alarm so very far away.
Sleep.
Complete and total exhaustion is, to be fair, a well-known phenomenon of the week after Easter, and I had a concert on Tuesday on top of that. All the same, I think there’s more to it than that.
I intend to run a thorough, relaxed, luxurious investigation into this concept of looking after myself.
Beginning with sleep.
Night, all.
Kathleen Jowitt 