I couldn’t immediately remember making any significant decisions, as opposed to just going with the flow, this year, but, thinking about it, there were a couple of major decisions whose results have integrated themselves so seamlessly into my life that it becomes clear that they were the right ones.
Choosing to give birth at the Rosie Birth Centre in Cambridge was one of those. Even then so much was down to things that were outside my control – what my body and the baby wanted to do, my fabulous always-had-my-back community midwife being on duty that night…
Maybe choosing to have a sweep on my due date helped nine days down the line, maybe it didn’t; activating airplane mode at eight days overdue was definitely a good idea. Anyway, I was in the right place with the right people, and it was lovely, and I still get a bit teary thinking about it now.
I’m sharing a picture of the Quentin Blake drawing in my room, although it isn’t entirely representative as in the event I didn’t have time to get into the pool, let alone look at the artwork. This motherhood lark is hard work, but my theory is that most people get something that goes irritatingly perfectly, and for me it was the birth itself.
Or minus eleventh hour, I suppose. Anyway, the Bikes In Space Kickstarter has eleven hours left to run, is very nearly funded (it’ll be extremely annoying if it doesn’t quite get there), and has a brief interview with me on the updates tab. Go and have a look, and, if you were thinking of backing the project, now is very much the moment to do so.
It’s that time again… this year’s Bikes in Space Kickstarter is live. In fact, it’s been live for a few days now and is already over halfway funded. You have ten days in which to join the party: backing the crowdfunder is by far the easiest way to get your hands on a copy of the book, and there are various other rewards to tempt you as well.
This year’s edition is The Bicyclist’s Guide to the Galaxy, with a theme of books and bikes. My portal fantasy story, The Ride for the City, is first in the table of contents. It’s a tribute to Cambridge, that strange city of contrasts – and to the power of books, even terrible ones, to bring people together. This book, however, is not terrible. Quite the contrary.
Attending the Clausura (closing service) for Ely Cursillo #37. While the church wasn’t packed, people-wise, it was absolutely suffused with joy. It is such a privilege to lead this… movement? group? Community.
And now, winding up and winding down. After a very hectic month, this has been a nice peaceful week. I’m slowing down physically, but this feels appropriate rather than frustrating. Things are taking longer, and that’s fine. Walking thirty-five minutes to a routine ten minute appointment is an opportunity to be out in the sunshine; work tasks are taking as long as they take and the next time they happen it won’t be me doing them. But on the other hand, things that have been hanging over me for ages and which I thought were going to take ages have been tidying themselves up with remarkably little effort. We made a list of things to do this long weekend and got ninety per cent of it done on Friday.
And my concentration seems to be improving. It’s just taking a little effort now to settle down to an activity without trying to do three other things at the same time and check my phone every five minutes.
The mixed
The weather is gorgeous, but I am getting so hot.
The difficult and perplexing
I stubbed my toe on a chair at work. It bled a little at the time, but I thought nothing of it. Now I find that I have split the nail a long way down and half of it is flapping around, or would be if I hadn’t stuck a plaster over it. I have acquired some gauze and micropore tape, with which I hope I will be able to rig up something that will allow it to breathe and heal without catching on things. We’ll see.
What’s working
Immersion in water – whether by putting my feet in a plastic box full of cold water to cool them down, or by putting my entire self into a swimming pool.
Reading
I finished Seven Ages of Paris. Depressing (and, I can’t resist saying, not enough about the buses; though I don’t think that I had known that they parked them at fifty metre intervals down the Champs-Élysées to frustrate a German aerial troop landing: much good that did anybody) and, I feel, not entirely unbiased. But also entertaining and informative, and All Gallnow makes much more sense to me. (I often feel that any study of mid-twentieth century history is a process of gradually getting more and more of Flanders and Swann’s references.)
And this piece on Soul Survivor (it’s mostly not about the recent revelations of horrible stuff, which does not feel like something that I have any standing to talk about), which made me feel very much as if I’d dodged a bullet. I never went to Soul Survivor, though two of my brothers did. I can see exactly how, in my late teens, I’d have been vulnerable to getting peer pressured into having a significant pseudo faith experience. Even at the advanced age of 37 I found I had a lot of Doing Faith Wrong monsters on the loose this week.
Mending
Sewed a button back on.
Watching
Still the Giro d’Italia. My goodness, that time trial! I think, that if there had to be a dropped chain in there somewhere, this was the most satisfying way for it to work out. But all the same, argh.
Today is Licence to Queer’s Donate Another Day. I have places to be this morning (specifically, church, and not Our Lady of Smolensk) so I got ahead by watching GoldenEye last night. It’s my favourite of the Brosnan Bonds (and Brosnan is my Bond): such fun, and Natalya is great. Anyway, everyone else kicked off at ten today, and Tomorrow Never Dies starts at one, so join in if you like Bond, and chuck a tenner at Unicef.
Cooking
Yesterday I gutted and scaled and filleted a fish (a sea bream, to be precise) for the first time. I failed to get some of the flesh along the top side, but I think I’d do better with a proper filleting knife. Maybe I’ll get one. Made stock from the head and bones: risotto tomorrow.
Then I put a slice of prosciutto on top, sprinkled it with breadcrumbs, parsley, and parmesan cheese, and cooked it alongside roast courgette, pepper and onion (recipe from The Hairy Dieters). It was extremely tasty.
Eating
See above. Also (for I am not on a diet, hairy or otherwise) yellow-stickered Waitrose cream buns. I am getting massively hungry at the moment.
Moving
Swimming. Pilates (this happens every week, but usually on a Tuesday, so I’ve forgotten about it by the time I get to this post. This week’s session was yesterday).
Noticing
Three small deer (one fawn, and presumably two parents) on the path behind our house. Muntjacs, maybe? I’m not very good at deer.
A train in GWR livery at Cambridge station – rather a long way from home, one would have said.
In the garden
I weeded one raised bed and put in three tomato plants. The other one didn’t need so much in the way of weeding; I put runner beans in it. And I found space for five cosmos plants around the garden.
The first rose is blooming. I think this bush is my favourite, aside from its habit of trying to revert to the rootstock; it has a lovely, faintly lemonish, scent.
Appreciating
Time. Focus. Other people’s gardens.
Acquisitions
I finally gave in and ordered three frocks from Joanie. One of them looks more like a tablecloth than I’d anticipated; one will do very nicely for the autumn; and one is fabulous and I’m wearing it now. (I don’t think I mind looking like a tablecloth, but the dress in question doesn’t fit. Yet. I think I’m just getting to the end of the phase where taking my usual size and ensuring it has a very full skirt is working. Still, only another month or so to go…)
From plant stalls outside people’s houses: two chilli pepper plants (one cayenne, one Hungarian something or other); three tomato plants (one Garnet, one Roma, one I’ve forgotten); and a honeysuckle.
Hankering
Well, a filleting knife, now.
Line of the week
From Rosemary Hill’s piece Consulting the Furniture in the last London Review of Books. (It is about time I went back to Kettle’s Yard. Maybe in a couple of weeks when I am on maternity leave…
Kettle’s Yard’s particular kind of austere elegance suits Cambridge and its Puritan, parliamentary history. It could never have happened in Oxford.
This coming week
Bank holiday. A committee meeting. Some family coming to see us. And, I hope, I’ll get the study sorted.
Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!
We had a weekend at a spa! I had never done this before, having mentally classified it under ‘not for the likes of us’ and also been nervous about getting it all wrong and exposing myself as a total fraud, but the in-laws suggested it as a nice thing to do before the baby appears and we disappear into a mountain of laundry, and I had to admit they had a point. So we booked into Quy Mill, just outside Cambridge, for one of the few free weekends we have this summer.
Anyhow, the conversation somehow moved from ‘haha, we could cycle there!’ to ‘actually, we could cycle there!’ and our successful excursion to an antenatal class in Littleport demonstrated that taking the Bromptons on the train and cycling to our destination was perfectly practical. (I know this in theory, but it had been a while since I’d put it into practice.) So we decided to cycle there. And then the purchase of a cargo bike happened rather faster than we’d anticipated, and suddenly it made sense for Tony to pick that up on the way. Fortunately it is large enough to hold one folded Brompton, so he was able to cycle to pick up the new bike and then cycle onwards on the new bike carrying the old one. (Yo dawg, I heard you liked cycling, so I put a cycle in your cycle so you can cycle while you cycle…)
This made it possibly the most Cambridge spa trip imaginable, even if we hadn’t then cycled over to Anglesey Abbey the next day.
It was very pleasant. There was extremely nice food; I had a lot of stress massaged out of my back; I also had my toenails painted. I went swimming twice. And we avoided most of the coronation hoohah. (I am what you might call a pragmatic monarchist: I can quite see that you need someone to cut the ribbons and all that, but my patience for the breathless commentary had been wearing very, very thin.)
Other good things this week: the political news was encouraging; the antenatal class was very interesting; the garden is flourishing.
The mixed
I generally enjoy thunderstorms, but not when I’m trying to get somewhere. I spent quite a long time sheltering in the underpass beneath the A14, 300 metres from my destination, but also 300 metres from the last lightning strike.
Also I got lost in Fen Ditton. This is becoming a habit and I could really do without it. I think I’d have beat the thunderstorm had it not been for that extra two kilometres.
The difficult and perplexing
I haven’t quite got the hang of ‘winding down’; or, rather, I’m doing OK at the doing less, but not so well at the feeling OK about it.
What’s working
Being outside. Using the Brompton rather than the (heavy) town bike.
Reading
I’m keeping on with Seven Ages of Paris (Alistair Horne). Have reached the twentieth century. No mention of the buses yet but it may yet happen (we have had the taxis of the Marne). Began Towers in the Mist (Elizabeth Goudge) – more appropriate than I’d realised, since the action begins on May day.
Finished Black Gay British Christian Queer (Jarel Robinson-Brown): very good indeed. Also God’s Lovers in an Age of Anxiety (Joan M. Nuth); Julian of Norwich continues to be the best.
Read Miss Marple’s Final Cases and finally ran out of steam with Agatha Christie with Murder is Easy.
Watching
Never Say Never Again was on telly on bank holiday Monday, so I joined in the Licence To Queer watchalong. I think it’s rather underrated, actually, and I much prefer it to the original Thunderball (omits the coercion and a lot of the tedious shark stuff).
I have been watching the Giro d’Italia with Tony. And we managed to turn on the telly at exactly the right moment to hear the new Vivats in I Was Glad (and then to be irritated by the commentators talking over the rest of it and confirm our decision not to watch any more coronation stuff).
Looking at
The Last Supper, a set of sculptures by Silvy Weatherall, at the cathedral. These are abstract busts made from broken crockery stuck together with gold, kintsugi style. While I could see what she was getting at, I failed to get beyond my initial reaction – which was ‘Doctor Who monsters’.
Cooking
‘Asian-style aromatic pork’ from one of the slow cooker books – OK but not particularly exciting.
Eating
Quy Mill did very nicely by us. I was particularly impressed by the slow-cooked lamb and the (remarkably light) sticky toffee pudding. Last night we went to the White Hart in Fulbourn, and I had a Mediterranean vegetable pizza.
Moving
Cycling – nothing further than 8km, but quite a few short journeys. (It’s rather galling to have someone on the exact same bike whoosh past you, but I don’t think he was seven months pregnant…) And swimming.
Noticing
Nesting swans on Ditton Meadows (when I rode past on Friday evening, the one that wasn’t in charge of the nest was blocking half the cycle path; today, it was swimming in the ditch). A wagtail at the hotel this morning. Very vocal blackbirds. The same graffiti on the Chesterton railway bridge that’s been there as long as I can remember.
In the garden
Loads of apple blossom, and bees enjoying it. Plenty of wisteria flowering too. The white rose that always flowers first has five buds; the others are beginning to think about it.
Appreciating
A four-day week. A weekend of mild hedonism.
Acquisitions
I have mentioned the cargo bike – not that I shall be riding it for another couple of months. A couple of small fripperies in the shop at Anglesey Abbey.
Hankering
We’re considering some garden furniture – the main problem being that ‘big enough to eat dinner off’ and ‘small enough to fit sensibly under the pergola’ are incompatible specifications. Some thought required…
Line of the week
From the London Review of Books, here’s Sam Rose on Clive Bell:
it’s hard to feel very sorry for a man who insisted on having it all, got more than his fair share, and spent his life increasingly embittered about the little that had been denied him.
This coming week
Another bank holiday, another antenatal class, some travel that’s become rather more complicated than it needed to be, and, most excitingly, a wedding.
Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!
A car I have not driven. Lovely, though, isn’t it?
Today it is sixteen years since I last drove a car on the road.
That wasn’t deliberate. I only remember the date because it was the day before my graduation, and how could I forget that such an occasion happened on quatorze juillet? I failed my second driving test the day before I graduated, therefore I must have driven for the last time on the thirteenth of July. (In actual fact, I drove a Routemaster around a field a couple of months later, but that’s another story.)
I hadn’t meant that to be the last time I took my driving test. But I was moving out of the city where I’d learned to drive, and that meant that for the next test I’d have to learn a whole new set of test routes. And I’d just graduated and I didn’t have a job, and I never got round to sorting out lessons. My grand plan that year was to walk to Santiago de Compostela, and I didn’t need a car to do that. Then I spent two months in Germany and was thoroughly spoiled by the public transport system.
At the end of all that, seventeen months after failing my second driving test, I moved to Guildford. This is a notoriously expensive place to live and, even though I was living in a horrible bedsit, and even though I signed up with a temp agency fairly promptly, I didn’t have the money to spare for driving lessons.
I moved in with my fiancé. He had a car. I never drove it, though. I think I probably assumed that I would, sooner or later, but money was still tight. He was a PhD student and I was a temp, and we were living in Guildford.
I inherited a car from my godmother, but I swapped it for a piano. (The piano was left to my mother, but she already had one. The car ended up with my father, I think.) I couldn’t drive and I couldn’t play the piano, either.
We moved to Woking, which was marginally cheaper than Guildford, where I was still working. We managed to move everything except the piano in (or, in the case of the double bed, on) the car. Not long after that move, Tony started a different PhD. In London.
Nobody drives into London. Not without a very good reason – disability, say, or actually living there. We did not have a very good reason to drive into London. In fact, we had no good reason to drive at all. I could take the train to Guildford. Tony could take the train to London. We could go pretty much anywhere else we fancied by train, because Woking, while not terribly interesting in itself (unless you’re a Martian invader), is very well-connected. And the car was sitting on the road costing us £600 a year before we’d even put fuel in.
The car went to a couple of affable blokes from somewhere in Wales. Looking back, that was probably the moment that confirmed my non-driving path. Up until then, driving occupied a slot in the ‘get around to it some day’ filing cabinet in my head. If I ever needed to, I’d told myself before, I’d learn to drive. Now I had to ask myself: but what? Tony could, and did, hire a car if he wanted to go somewhere off the public transport network. That wouldn’t have worked for me, because I didn’t have the familiarity with driving that would let me leap into a strange car and go somewhere safely, and now we didn’t have a car I wasn’t going to get it.
We adjusted very smoothly to life without a car. We walked to the shops. We commuted to work by train. We visited family by train. We started getting a veg box delivered. I bought a trike and started cycling. Tony had been cycling for years. We didn’t need a car. Not in Woking, anyway. It would have been a different story in the place where I grew up (a mile to the nearest village).
Not being able to drive might have been career limiting, but I was never terribly interested in the career track that would have required it. (A decade older and a billion times more confident, I think now that I wouldn’t have made a bad stab at it, but I don’t think it would ever have been my ideal future.) That problem disappeared when I moved to my employer’s head office and a job where nobody expected me to drive.
If we didn’t need a car in Woking, we certainly didn’t need one in Cambridge. (That move involved six months in separate temporary addresses, and Tony moved all the furniture except the piano in a hired van.) It is only slightly more advisable to drive into Cambridge than it is to drive into London. And I told myself that if I didn’t start riding a standard, two-wheeled, bike in Cambridge, I’d never do it at all. I did. Suddenly I could get to everything I needed to.
Life works perfectly well for me without driving. Of course, that’s because I’ve managed – first by luck, and later by design – to set it up that way. If I were still in a tiny hamlet in the Marches, I think I’d probably have to drive, or else get used to a very limited existence. As things are, we choose places to live based on walking and cycling distance from the amenities, and we are fortunate enough for that to be financially and logistically feasible.
More recently, I’ve developed intermittent vision loss (very occasional, but inconvenient in its very unpredictability) which makes me wonder whether I’d actually be safe behind a steering wheel. I don’t much like the thought of being suddenly unable to see out of my right eye while bowling down a motorway. Though I’ve heard of someone with the same thing who just pulls over when he notices it coming on.
Not driving does make it harder to visit other people. I have friends whose house I can see from my morning train, yes, but I have family in villages where the bus comes twice a week, or never. There is no point in our getting a National Trust membership, because the great and the good tended to build their stately piles a long way from anything so plebeian as public transport. And I might have been on a retreat in the last decade if so many retreat houses were not buried deep in the countryside with no bus service. (To be fair, the last retreat I went on was a five minute taxi ride from Godalming station, so it may also be that I just haven’t got around to it.)
I fret a lot about Putting People Out. Usually they are lovely and think nothing of going five miles out of their way to get me home. It turns out that five miles isn’t all that far, in a car. Or, in the case of my husband, hiring a car. Of course it does get awkward sometimes, if I’m very tired and would rather be by myself on a nice quiet train. More often, though, I get to know them a lot better, and, as someone to whom socialising doesn’t come naturally, that’s very valuable.
Of course, the longer my not driving goes on, the more it becomes about the environment. I came across The Jump a few months ago, and found it a lot more encouraging and less annoying than a lot of climate rhetoric. It identifies six broad ‘jumps’ (lifestyle changes, I suppose you could call them), one of which is ‘get rid of your personal vehicle’, but is very reassuring about not expecting perfection. Well, the cars we hire these days are electric, and if we ever do buy one (and my eye stops playing up and I learn to drive) it’ll be electric, but there’ll still be cobalt in the battery and rubber particulate to fret about. I fret less these days – or, rather, I have a more realistic sense of my own ability to effect large-scale change and consequently a more realistic sense of my own responsibility – but, having accidentally forged a lifestyle in which I don’t drive and don’t have to, it seems a bit silly not to keep it going.
And it’s gone on a long time. Next year my existence as a non driver will be old enough to drive.
These three roundels (I don’t think I can really call them baubles when they’re flat) are part of a set that was a Christmas present from my aunt several years ago. This is the aunt who lives in Germany, near Frankfurt, and in 2007 I spent a couple of months living with her and her family while I was trying to work out what to do with my life.
I don’t remember any of the churches in and around Frankfurt looking much like the one in the middle there. That’s a style that I associate more with Bavaria and Austria. When I was out there I attended a charismatic church led by one of my aunt’s colleagues. It was a bit of an eye-opener after a a childhood in rural Anglicanism and three years at the university chapel. Somebody had a prophetic image for me. I’d never had one of those before, and I didn’t really know what to do about it, though in retrospect I don’t think they were far off.
One of the questions associated with moving to a new place is: where will I go to church? Pretty soon after I came back from Germany, I moved to Guildford. I was miserable for a lot of the time that I lived in Guildford, but the one thing I never regretted was ending up at Holy Trinity for the Advent Carol Service (I’d been aiming for the cathedral, but had drastically misjudged the time it would have taken to walk there). It was just the church I needed: it had an inclusive approach, intelligent preaching, a reassuring stability, and, in its excellent but non-auditioned choir, a way that I could contribute even when my confidence was absolutely shot and I was hanging on by a thread. We kept going there even after we moved to Woking and I was quite a bit saner.
Later, we moved to Cambridge – Chesterton, to be precise. I thought that St Andrew’s was our parish church. In fact, it wasn’t, but it was the church I needed. Not that I immediately realised this. We happened to land on a family service, which was not really our thing. A couple of months later, we hit a sung eucharist and found that there was indeed a choir that we could join. I went to family services quite a bit more when we were settled there, though. I ended up contributing more than I’d expected, too: by the time we moved on, I was a PCC member, leader of the twenties and thirties study group, and occasional reader and intercessor, as well as a choir member.
I mentioned last year that moving house in a pandemic had its advantages. One of those was the fact that church went online, so I could hang on at St Andrew’s for far longer than would have been feasible in other times. I even got involved in leading informal worship (I’d imagine all that’s still on Youtube) and was still doing that up until this summer. In theory, the great onlining could also have meant that I could get a taste of other churches via their Youtube channels, though in fact I didn’t do any particular church shopping that way. When the churches opened up again after the long 2020 closure I started going to Ely Cathedral. I’m still feeling like a complete newbie (pandemic time may have something to do with this) but I’m starting to get to know people and get involved in things.
I always do seem to end up at the church I need, even if it’s not immediately obvious why that’s the case. It’s almost as if someone has a better idea than I do…
As for working out what to do with my life: well, it all worked out, but not because of any particular effort or thought on my part, and it took rather longer than two months. I’m hoping to get back to Germany next year.
The St Nicholas decorations are great fun, very beautifully made, and rather expensive. Expensive, I think, because they’re beautifully made, but nevertheless outside what I think of as a sensible price for a Christmas tree ornament. I bought several of the Alice in Wonderland ones a couple of years ago, week by week, and had to write them into my budget.
However! I went into the cathedral shop several months ago, and there was an Etheldreda in the sale, so I bought her.
St Etheldreda was a princess of East Anglia and, after a vow of chastity, two marriages, and no children, founded the monastic house that became, several hundred years later, Ely Cathedral. Of course it’s difficult to pick one’s way between histories and hagiographies, and this is the period of English history where plenty of rulers ended up as saints. I’ve devoted very little time to research, but I get the impression that she was a formidable woman. All her sisters ended up as saints. I think they must have been quite formidable, too.
I’ve lived in a few cathedral cities in my time – Winchester, Exeter, Guildford (look, I’m not going to be picky), and now Ely. We left Winchester before I could read, and almost every time we’ve gone back it’s been to ride on buses. In Exeter, I lived most of my life on the university campus. Guildford’s only had a diocese since the twentieth century, and the cathedral is somewhat set apart, up on a hill.
In Ely, though, I get the sense of a city that exists because of its cathedral and because of its market. Ely is tiny as cities go: it can’t get much bigger because most of the land around it is below sea level. The big expansion has happened fifteen miles south, around Cambridge. In Ely I get the sense of a city that exists in very much the same way that it has for centuries. These days the cathedral brings in tourists as well as pilgrims and the market… well, the market attracts people wishing to buy stuff, some of which the medievals would have recognised and some of which they wouldn’t.
In some ways, Ely feels like everywhere I’ve ever lived, all at once: the rich light on old stone of Winchester and Exeter and Cambridge, the proximity to agriculture (tractors!) of the Welsh borders and the Isle of Wight, the excellent rail connections of Woking, the hills and the cobbles of Guildford. In others, it feels like nowhere else.
Etheldreda wouldn’t recognise the lush farmland and the complex system of drainage ditches that supports it. She’d be completely boggled by the railway, the fact that I can get to London in little more than an hour. She’d be bewildered by my bicycle, come to that. But there’s not much you can do to that big wide sky. Contrails aside, she’d recognise that.
One last thing: it took me a little while to catch on to the fact that St Etheldreda was also, later, known as St Audrey. St Audrey as in St Audrey’s Fair. St Audrey as in tawdry. The absolute blinginess that the designers have endowed her with her is really rather fitting.
While I’m on the subject of cathedrals, I loved Dr Eleanor Janega’s latest piece. (Even if she doesn’t talk about Winchester, Exeter, Guildford or Ely.)
… this lovely stretch of river. If you were to walk along this path and follow it around the bend, you’d see the railway cross the river on a big green-and-white painted steel bridge. If you were to leave the path just before you got to the bridge, turn right at the road, turn left just before you got to the level crossing, take the first right, and walk until you got to the first street light, you’d find yourself opposite the flat we lived in for almost six years.
It wasn’t meant to be that long. We hoped it was going to be the last place we rented before we bought somewhere, but I’m glad I didn’t know back in 2014 that it was going to take us that long to save up a deposit. That’s what comes of living in a place like Cambridge. That’s why we don’t live in Cambridge any more.
But six years of this wasn’t so bad. Six years of walking or cycling alongside this stretch of the Cam to get to the station or the shop or the pub or the church. Following the river upstream into the city, or downstream just for a walk.
I miss the river. I’m not that far away from it, really: the Cam flows into the Ouse, and the Ouse is about a half hour’s walk from where we are now. But it’s not there, the way it used to be. I’m glad I enjoyed it while I had it.
I am pleased to say that we are in fact up to date with the rent. But it is rather dispiriting to consider that, Cambridge property prices being what they are, we will probably be renting for some time yet. I believe that this was not – for a variety of reasons – something that Gwen Raverat had to deal with.
Kathleen Jowitt 