One of the joys of late summer commuting – on my commute, at least – is the fabulous display of sunflowers in the allotments just north of Royston station. They’re glorious, so bright and cheerful and yellow.
The people of Royston don’t grow sunflowers for me. I don’t think I know anybody in Royston, so how should they even know I exist? All the same, they lift my spirits.
Other people’s lights do much the same thing for me. It’s a dank and gloomy time of year, and I’m not sure when I last saw the sun. I am feeling equally dank and gloomy. Perhaps other people are, too. Certainly other people have put up lights, and they are very cheering.
Across the street there are nets of red and blue and green lights in the windows of one house; starbursts in the trees of the garden of another; a pyramid of warm white lights in a third. As of an hour and a half ago, when my husband put them up, we have a shower of blue-white lights along our fence. Who’s going to see them? I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.
Now we’re getting into the final stretch. Now the O Antiphons come out. Every day from now until the 23rd, one of these invocations frames the Magnificat at Evening Prayer, each of them another way to think of Christ. O Sapientia. O Adonai. O Radix Jesse. O Clavis David. O Oriens. O Rex Gentium. O Emmanuel.
Read backwards, in Latin, the initials spell out ERO CRAS. Tomorrow, I come. My suspicion is that this is just coincidence, but it’s a nice coincidence.
Today is O Sapientia. O Wisdom.
Really, making them into a calendar seemed like the obvious thing to do. This is made of Graze boxes, of which I used to have quite a few before I got fed up with all the plastic. Graze boxes, and a lot of purple paint, and quite a bit of gold paint, and gold gift ribbon, and five wooden beads to slip under the lid of the piano and keep it in place.
Of course, since it works like any other Advent calendar, I could have arranged the whole thing backwards to make the acrostic work out. But that would mean committing to thinking it deliberate, so I’m going to leave it. For the moment, at least.
Scallop shells, to me, mean the Camino de Santiago. Pilgrimage. Many roads converging on one city. Tired feet. A hint that you’re on the right path. A gentle nudge in the right direction.
Once you’ve started thinking about a pilgrimage, you start seeing shells everywhere. Afterwards, they keep showing up. This one came from Paperchase.
I like a symbol. A clue. A waymark. Shells gave way to hearts after a while; lately it’s been stars and compasses, although really it’s all the same thing: something to steer by.
I don’t know whether I’ll go back to Santiago. If I do, it will probably be late one autumn. Or perhaps I’ll just leave room for somebody else to make the journey for the first time.
Continuing with the ‘pins and polystyrene’ theme from yesterday, here’s a bauble that my friend Anne made for me in the colours of the bi pride flag. Anne is a great enabler (she’d probably say the same of me) and she’s shared, encouraged me, or both, in many of the most enjoyable and ambitious projects of my adult life. We walked to Santiago de Compostela together. She was one of my bridesmaids. She sensitivity-read my second novel. I got her started on sewing and now she does absolutely exquisite embroidery. She’s very good at getting me to get over myself and sing stuff. We played Animal Crossing long before it was cool. She got me into Doctor Who. She’s unapologetically enthusiastic about all kinds of things. And it’s very good to have a friend who’ll make you a bauble in the colours of your pride flag.
I made this bauble. That is, I punched out hundreds of little leaf shapes from the previous year’s Christmas cards and pinned them onto a polystyrene ball and stuck an eyepin into the top of the ball and threaded string through the eyepin.
There is surely enough polystyrene in the world already. The punch is not what it once was. And three Christmas cards saved from the bin isn’t really going to make much of a difference.
Meanwhile, if I were going to pay myself minimum wage for making this it would be well into double digits of pounds.
It’s a failure in pretty much every dimension – except for one. It is pretty. No, two. I enjoyed doing it.
I think there’s something worth finding in the pleasure of making something, or growing something, or writing something. This year I’ve been writing to please myself. Nothing worthy. Nothing that’s going to make my fortune. Just what I want to write, because I want to write it. Maybe I’ll say more about that another day. And maybe I won’t.
This little glass frog dates from my temping days. 2008, probably. I was working at the hospital, and most weeks there’d be an interesting stall in the main corridor, selling various fripperies. Make-up. Russian dolls. Little glass trinkets.
2008 was a miserable year. There were two major bereavements. I had no idea what I was meant to be doing with my life. And there really wasn’t much money to spare. Things were certainly tight enough that I felt guilty about buying things I didn’t strictly need. Like glass frogs. Having read back through some of my diaries from that time, and horrified myself in the process, I think I was probably quite severely depressed.
Two good things happened, however. I joined the choir at Holy Trinity, Guildford. And – in a lucid moment when we’d got out of Guildford for a weekend and got some perspective – I asked my boyfriend to marry me.
He said yes, and of course that resulted in all the excitement and stress of planning a wedding, which I’m not sure I’d do ever again even if I hadn’t developed reservations about the entire institution in the meantime. (However, it worked out for us, so that question hasn’t arisen.) It also resulted in our being given a little book of marriage preparation, addressing various topics like families and money and sex and children. And dreams. Hopes for the future, that sort of dream.
I could not deal with that section at all. I did not have any dreams. I could not imagine what my future might be. I didn’t know what I wanted, or, if I did, I certainly couldn’t say it.
So we left it.
Well, that’s over a decade ago now, and I’ve spent a lot of that decade getting my head into a much better place. I have begun to get my head around the idea that it might be OK for me to want things.
Answer came there none. So I just got on with things, the way I did in 2008 but feeling much better about all of it, because this time we’d parted on much better terms.
A couple of months ago, looking at the gospel for the coming Sunday, somewhere in the teens after Trinity, it hit me. The story was Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, sitting at the side of the road, yelling for Jesus to help him.
Who asks him:
What do you want me to do for you?
And I realised then that the reason I wasn’t getting an answer to that question was that this question was being asked of me. I’d been looking at things completely the wrong way round. I’d done the obedience thing. I’d followed it all the way to the end of the road. Now I needed to take responsibility, to ask for what I want. To know what I want.
I said:
I’ll have to get back to you on that one.
Because at that moment I really didn’t know.
Do I know what I want? I think I do – now. I’m still finding it very difficult to get my head around the idea. There are two possible bad outcomes, of course. What if I want it and I don’t get it? And what if I want it and I get it and it turns out to be awful and it’s all my fault?
But of course it would be even more tragic if I never let myself want it and never even tried. Wouldn’t it?
I’m beginning to see the first glimmerings of it, to understand that what I want might in fact be a clue to what’s wanted of me, that my desires and wishes might be a more reliable guide than I’ve previously thought. Well, that’s something for this next year.
Which is all a long way away from a little glass frog. What do you do with a little glass frog? Eventually I wrapped some wire around it and turned it – together with a couple of its colleagues – into a Christmas tree decoration. Why not?
These two angels came from a set of six. This was relatively early in my practice of distributing Christmas decorations around my loved ones: two angels went to my mother, two to my father, and I kept the last two. Three of them carried banners, and three of them other objects. A trumpet, as you see here, and I think perhaps the other two had a star and a bell. The banners all had different words. I forget what the other two said. JOY? LOVE? PEACE? Fairly standard Christmassy sentiments, anyway. FAITH seemed a bit incongruous, somehow. Which sounds odd, given that it would go very happily with HOPE and LOVE, but I bet you know what I mean.
It took me, a lifelong churchgoer, a very long time to feel even halfway comfortable with the idea of faith. I think I used to imagine it as a sort of holy willpower: you can do anything if you have enough faith! With the (usually unspoken) corollary: if it isn’t happening, you clearly don’t have enough faith. I also used to get it mixed up with belief, which didn’t help: if it isn’t happening, you clearly aren’t believing the right things hard enough. (What ‘it’ was, that might or might not have been happening, I’m not sure. I don’t think I made any practical test of this, just grumped about it.)
It helped when somebody expressed it as the relationship you have with the Divine. It helped when somebody linked it with trust, truth, troth. I wrote out all my complicated feelings about my ancestors converting from other religions and denominations to the Church of England, and then tripped over John 15:16. You did not choose me, but I chose you. I read Nicholas Lash’s book on the Creed and felt happier about the believing thing too. In the last couple of years someone pointed out that my continuing stubbornly to show up (to church, to pray, generally) even when, mid-depression, nothing seemed to be going on at all, might be what faith looked like. It doesn’t feel like that, but maybe that’s the point.
I’m not sure that I ever chose faith (see lifelong churchgoer, above). Sometimes I think it was chosen for me (ibid). Sometimes I think that it chose me. Maybe none of that’s relevant. Anyway, I keep on showing up.
Alice came, appropriately enough, from the British Library. So did quite a few of the permanent inhabitants of Wonderland. I picked them up week by week: the Mock Turtle, the Cheshire Cat, the flamingo, the Knave of Hearts…
I looked at her just now and the part of my brain that’s always quoting something said, ‘Very Tenniel.’ I first came across Alice in Ballet Shoes, in the excruciatingly embarrassing sequence where Pauline gets the part instead of a friend who’s really better qualified and probably needs the money more, and then gets a severe case of swelled head… I didn’t read Alice in Wonderland until a few years later.
Actually, I’m not sure that this Alice is very Tenniel; she seems rather calm and unruffled, as if she’s never fallen down a rabbithole in her life. I’m very fond of book!Alice, largely because of how logical and observant she is, and the way she approaches confusing and frightening situations: wanders around and asks questions. And occasionally cries. It’s as good a philosophy as any.
I bought this unicorn in 2008. We were absolutely skint, so it came from a charity shop. We were absolutely skint, so the tree it hung from was in fact a ficus plant that someone had given us as a housewarming present. We were living in Guildford, which is not a great place to be skint. It is, however, a good place to find nice things in charity shops. This is because everybody else has plenty of disposable income, and can buy nice things, and then send their previous nice things to the charity shop. Things like unicorns. And, because of the wonky horn, it was a reasonable price, and I bought it along with some boring green baubles and some beaded icicles and some other things that I might share in the next couple of weeks. It must have been a bit heavy for the ficus. Even on sturdy firs and spruces it has to go quite far back towards the trunk.
Of all the things to be pedantic about (and I am pedantic about many things, though since it isn’t ually very edifying I try to keep most of them to myself) mythical beasts are probably one of the silliest. Unicorns do not actually exist, so it is really a bit pointless to complain that people always get the tails wrong. But they do. A unicorn isn’t just a horse with a horn on its forehead! It ought to have a beard, and a solid tail with a tuft. This one’s a proper unicorn. And I don’t care if its horn’s a bit wonky.
These little felt trees live in the in-tray on my desk at the office. My fabulous ex-colleague Hazel gave them to me several years ago, and they’ve been there ever since. I’m not sure that I really count them as decorations, since they’re there all the time, but they seem rather poignant today.
Given recent developments, it’s quite possible that I won’t see any of my colleagues in the flesh again before Christmas, and, much as I’m usually reluctant to get deep into Office Christmas (I simply cannot be that cheerful for that long) this isn’t a normal year. Actually it’s all a bit sad – almost more so than last year, when all of us were online all the time.
I missed the last great shutdown because I was busy moving house at the time: my week’s leave folded seamlessly into Lockdown I. Today I thought briefly about taking these trees home. I don’t think it would really make any difference, though.
Kathleen Jowitt 