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.
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.
I don’t know where this year’s gone. (I mean, I know exactly why it’s gone, but that isn’t quite the same thing.) Which is unusual for me, because I usually make a point of being aware of where I am in time.
These last few days, though, it’s all seemed to settle down, though not on account on anything I’ve done myself. The Morville Year, which I’d bought and immediately lost in the extra safe place in which I’d hidden the present I bought at the same time, turned up (as did the present – too late for the birthday for which it was originally intended, but just in time for Christmas). I loved The Morville Hours and the way it moves gently through the cycle of the year, and have been looking forward to reading this, a collection of related articles.
Slow Time is an old friend, a book that’s encouraged me to explore the calendar and the traditions in which I grew up. And one thing that I have already noticed about organised children’s activities is that they are very keen on seasonal themes, so it ought to get easier from here on in.
One last thing. I was amused to note, firstly that I’d run out of my previous soap bar just in time to start the Christmas Spice one – and secondly, that the one I’ve just finished (and had been using all through Advent) was called Wake Up Call. If you know, you know.
Beginning with this slightly wonky Advent candle, which I need to jam more firmly into its bottle. I’m not sure that I’ll share pictures for all the prompts (I’m generally not sharing baby pictures publicly, for a start), but we’ll see how we go. It’ll be interesting to see how the prompts do or don’t match up with the names of Jesus on the candle, and the windows in the calendar, and the poems in the book (any of which I may drop behind on any day, of course). Anyway, I have to burn my way through this star to get the whole thing started.
Co-tutoring a Speaking With Confidence course on Thursday. Helping people feel more able to do their thing and being able to enthuse about how writing works.
The difficult and perplexing
Ugh, the trains home from London afterwards. Apparently there was a bomb scare at New Southgate. Anyway, I didn’t get home until nine at night, and because the train was pretty crowded I couldn’t take my mask off and was getting more and more antsy.
The cat brought up a hairball on my computer keyboard. At least it wasn’t on the laptop, I suppose.
Far more serious than any of that, this week saw a difficult anniversary for some of my in-laws. I’ve been thinking of them a lot.
What’s working
Napping. Tangfastics.
Make-up. I can’t usually be bothered, but I like to put a game face on when I’m delivering training, and I got three separate compliments.
Taking my bike on the train to an appointment on Tuesday evening meant that what would have been a twenty minute walk on an unfamiliar road became a five minute ride on an unfamiliar road, and I was able to get things done and get the next train back.
Reading
I finished Destination Unknown, which I hadn’t exactly meant to do, but the cat was on my lap and there was nothing else within reach. Continuing slowly with Meet Cute. And I got to the Council of Elrond and out the other side.
I forgot to mention last week that I finished The Paris Apartment. Certainly twisty, but I don’t think it’s Foley’s best.
Writing
A tiny, tiny bit on the Romeo and Juliet thing. If I have very little reading brain, my writing brain is barely there at all.
Making
Secret patchwork project is 5/6 done, and I’ll be able to share pictures very soon.
Watching
Eurosport’s winter sports offerings; today, in particular, the Grand Prix Espoo.
Cooking
Supper today was pancakes stuffed with a sausage, tomato and cabbage filling, a bit like bigos except using fresh cabbage instead of sauerkraut. Except I can’t do pancakes, so the filling was on the side.
Eating
I had a really nice piece of Bakewell tart on Thursday. Kudos to the work canteen and whoever they get their cake from.
Noticing
A magnificent mutant Tangfastic (see picture). It seems to have been made of three dinosaurs and a dummy. I’ve eaten it now.
In the garden
The Japanese anemone is flowering. And I really need to sweep up some leaves. And prune the fruit trees.
Appreciating
My big Chinese quilted jacket. I got it for a few quid in a Cambridge charity shop several years ago and it is just the thing for winter.
Acquisitions
A few ebooks that were on sale in Kobo. Today I picked up two Chrestomanci books (Diana Wynne Jones) and a couple of Eva Ibbotsons too in the Ely charity shops. My inner twelve year old is very pleased.
Line of the week
Because the hotel in Destination Unknown sounds heavenly, or, one shoud say, paradisiacal:
This was what a garden was meant to be, a place shut away from the world – full of green and gold.
Saturday snippet
Here’s a bit from the Romeo and Juliet thing:
He slung his kitbag over the shoulder and crossed the footbridge, the noise of his boots on the iron treads drowned by the yell of the whistle. He paused for a moment at the middle. An express train was hurtling towards him on the up fast line, seeming to gather speed and detail as it approached.
This coming week
Advent starts tomorrow! I seem to be on all the rotas at once, but am departing for the Isle of Wight on Monday morning.
Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!
More Playmobil – and possibly not the last I’ll share, either. These birds are an unofficial addition to the crib scene. They were a present from Anne a few years ago. Because she likes birds. And because Tony likes bad puns, possibly. (I mean, he does. I just don’t know whether the Holy Parakeet one was in play from the start.) I don’t know. Do we need a reason?
As is probably obvious, I don’t have anything terribly clever to say today. I seem to have used up most of my brain doing edits on a short story, and that’s perhaps more than I’d hoped. I had said to the editors that I was aiming to get it back to them before Christmas, but I thought that was optimistic at the time. Now it’s done – and so am I.
This morning the sitting room curtain rail fell down. That made me ten minutes later logging in to work than I could have been, and I was already a quarter of an hour later than I’d meant to be. This evening I logged out and went straight to bed. Now I’m sitting on the sofa in a room with an undecorated tree and a candle burning in the curtainless window. There’s always space for a little more chaos, particularly at this time of year.
I could claim that the tree is deliberately bare, and that wouldn’t be entirely untrue. Tradition in the Jowitt household used to be that there was one grand decorating session on Christmas Eve. And some years it’s been fairly crucial for my sanity to still be hanging on in Advent while everyone around me was three Secret Santas in. But it wouldn’t be entirely true, either, because I think the actual idea was to decorate it yesterday.
But there’s time. There’s time. The truth hidden in the (sacred and secular) admonitions to ‘Get ready!’ is that I’m not really expected to be ready yet.
There’s time. One of the first things I did after I finally logged in this morning was to request holiday for tomorrow. I had time just sitting there: granted, I could carry it over to next year, but why do that, when I’d really appreciate it now? I’ll use it to make mince pies. Or pierniczki. Or write. Or read. Or watch something. Or go for a walk. Or maybe just sleep. And perhaps we’ll decorate the tree – or perhaps we really will leave it for Christmas Eve.
Kathleen Jowitt 