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.
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.
Last year, Book Bus Stories was an exhibition. Next year, it might finally be a book. But this year, it’s a zine.
I haven’t been writing much in recent months; you may have seen how quiet I’ve been over here and guessed that it reflects a prolonged period of literary inactivity offline. I haven’t had much time, I haven’t had much energy, and, if I’m honest, a lot of the time I’ve been lacking the inclination too. It’s a side-effect of motherhood that I didn’t expect at all: for well over a decade I’d had a story more or less constantly writing itself in my head – until I had a baby, and it all just – went. It was if my brain had been replaced with someone else’s, someone who didn’t write, and had no interest in writing. Which was just as well, really, because she didn’t have the time and the energy.
Every now and again an idea rushed back in, and I’d get very excited. And either I’d lie awake with a sleeping child in the crook of my elbow and know that if I moved I’d wake her, or by some miracle I’d find an hour and get it written down, and then it would stick there because by the next time I got a free hour there’d be something else that needed doing, or that seemed more fun.
Meanwhile, Smashwords (which I use to distribute the ebook versions of my Stancester books) kept sending me emails about migrating my account to Draft2Digital, which kept reminding me that I’d never sorted out my tax code on there and therefore had (a frankly pitiful amount of) money sitting on my account, and every time I felt irritated and slightly despairing of ever selling any more of my existing books, let alone ever finishing a new one. 2020 – the last time I published a book – was getting longer and longer ago, and I was feeling less and less like the person who’d done it.
Then one lunchtime I went to the Wellcome Collection. They had an exhibition of zines, mostly by disabled people. They talked about how zines are amateur, scruffy, don’t have to be perfect. In the corner was a table with paper and pens and a sign encouraging you to have a go at making your own zine, about saying the things you had to say.
I had things to say, things about grief and loss and memory.
I thought, I could do a zine.
A book still seemed a very long way out of reach, but I could do a zine. Or I could at least try one. I went back to my desk and folded a sheet of A4 paper into eighths. I drew a bus across two of them. A little doggerel quatrain emerged from my mind with barely any trouble at all.
Back at home, I unearthed an A3 pad and started on the real thing. There was a poem I’d written years ago, intended for the eventual Book Bus Stories book, which went straight in. In a charity shop I found a book of photographs of Paris, all chic and moody and monochrome, which, combined with the experience of speedrunning a dozen years of (moody, monochrome) family photographs while preparing for my mother’s funeral, made me think everything looks better in black and white, and then, everything looks sadder in black and white. That became a piece.
I photocopied several pages of my father’s Paris Is Well Worth A Bus and, after several false starts, got a reasonable blackout poem down.
I stuck down a Kimberley Ales beermat and an Artichaut de Bretagne sticker to make wheels. I got out the Dymo machine.
The cat trod on the paper while I was working on it and I remembered my father yelling “Trolloper!” at her; I drew a cloud around the pawprint and wrote about how it helps and hurts to remember things like that.
I filled in the body of the bus, the platform, the window frames. I thought I was done. Then I went to Gay’s The Word (on a bit of a weepy high because the General Synod of the Church of England had finally done away with Issues in Human Sexuality as a requirement for ordinands), picked up Joe Brainard’s I Remember, read about twenty pages, and knew that I needed to fill in all the white space with the things I don’t remember.
On Friday I took the whole thing to the library and did a photocopy by way of a test. It looked great. (Everything does, in fact, look better in black and white.) I took it to the print shop and got a proper print run (fifty, in fact) done. Then I took the whole lot home and, over the weekend and today, cut and folded the lot into booklets. Now they’re packed in a box, ready to go down to Ventnor Fringe and the Book Bus with me tomorrow. It’s a good feeling.
I made a zine. It’s not perfect. And it’s not a book. But it’s good enough, and it turns out that good enough is actually great.
Meanwhile, across the water from the memorial gathering…
“I hope the funeral goes well,” several people said to me, and many of them added, “or as well as these things can go.”
I very much appreciated the sentiment behind that wish. And I knew exactly what they meant.
And yet. And yet it didn’t quite sit right with me, as if there was somehow an implication that because a funeral is necessarily a sad event, there would be things that would not go well. That things would go wrong, even. That because it wasn’t a joyous occasion it must necessarily be somehow slipshod, drab. That difficult and sloppy sit near each other on the same axis.
I don’t believe for a moment that anyone who used that phrase to me meant to imply any of that, of course I don’t. But this kept worrying away at me until I prodded it back.
I’ve been involved in planning all sorts of events – in my professional life, in my voluntary roles, and in my personal life. Courses, parties, retreats, church services, training days, conferences, seminars, weddings.
And yes, funerals.
I can make an event go really well. My mother’s funeral? You bet I was going to do everything I could to make that one go as well as it possibly could.
It went really well – yes, as well as it could. But better than that. Both parts – the “she didn’t want a fuss” church service and crematorium committal, and the “but more people want to pay their respects than will fit in the church” arts centre gathering the next day.
And it was really, really hard. I was very glad, in retrospect, that I didn’t put myself forward to do any reading or give any tribute at the church service, because that gave me space to fall apart completely. I’d done the work of remembering which hymn my mother wanted (yes, I found myself saying to several people afterwards, she specifically wanted the verse about the worms) and guessing which other one she might have liked, of suggesting the readings, of burrowing in the boxes of CDs in the garage to find the Bruckner Te Deum, of liasing with my brothers and the minister and my aunt, of typesetting the order of service and getting it printed. I’d done all that, and now all I had to do was to turn up. The minister carried it, and the liturgy, and my brilliant family who will absolutely sing in four-part harmony if you give them the sheet music.
The next day I was the one at the front of the room, explaining what was going to happen, introducing the musicians, finding a graceful way to bring in someone who’d arrived late but still wanted to say something. Holding the space. I remember thinking at one point that I had my work head on, because that’s what I do.
And that was hard, too. I will probably never be able to listen to Here comes the sun again, maybe never sing Auld Lang Syne.
Some things went wrong, of course. I’d have liked to have got to the church earlier and had some time on my own (as opposed to having a flaming row over a sandwich and having to spend far longer than necessary putting my make-up on and calming down). I’d have liked to have the Brahms run all the way to the end of the track. And I think the funeral directors had some trouble with the hearse and the very tight little lane, but that wasn’t my responsibility. It wasn’t perfect. But on the whole, it went very well indeed.
But it was hard because it went well. It was hard because it did what it needed to do. It was hard because there’s no way that catharsis is going to be easy. It was hard because it said what it needed to say: This person is gone, and we loved her. We loved her, and this is the last thing we can do for her.
And because it was the last thing we could do for her, we did it as well as we could.
Thank you, friends. It did indeed go as well as these things can go.
Twelve Words for Moss (Elizabeth-Jane Burnett) was a Christmas present from one of my brothers. It’s uncategorisable: poetry, (family) history, memoir, nature – it takes as its starting points the author’s grief at the death of her father and her enthusiasm for mosses, and weaves a narrative between the two.
I got a few chapters in before I noticed that the last sentence of each becomes the first of the next, and went back to the beginning to see what else I’d missed. When I made the deliberate effort to slow down and read the words one by one, it burst into life and turned out to be poetry. Although this did make the occasional nature-documentary-voiceover style introductions of experts somewhat jarring.
What felt simply odd to me was the absence of any sense of Burnett’s father’s personality. I think it must have been a deliberate choice, to convey the gravity of the loss by not really talking about the one who was lost, and I’m not even sure that I can say that it didn’t work for me, but it was alien. If I’d got interested in moss to the extent that Burnett has, my father would have known about it, would have got interested in it on my behalf, and would have bought me books on moss in charity shops and phoned me up to tell me that he’d heard a programme about moss on the radio,and every time I encountered moss now I’d think of him. For me, grief is about that shared connection that can’t be shared any more, that recoils on me with a jolt because there’s nowhere for it to go now. And fair enough, maybe that’s not the sort of person that Burnett’s father was, but my point is that you just can’t tell from this book.
That doesn’t take away from how interesting a book it is, though, or how lovely the words, and I always enjoy seeing people getting really, really enthusiastic about something. And I have been noticing moss much more.
I’ve been struggling a bit with fiction recently: I find myself not wanting to feel things deeply (plenty of that in real life), so this month’s choices have been deliberately light. Although not in subject matter. Actually, I suppose both this month’s novels grapple with the question of how far we are entitled to influence the lives of our loved ones:
Hate Follow (Erin Quinn-Kong) deals with a subject that’s interested me since it first started hitting the news a decade or so ago: what happens when the children of internet personalities come of age (literally or metaphorically) and are in a position to object to their parents’ use of their names, likenesses, and actions. This was a rather superficial take on the subject: it suffered from a desire to make too many people basically well-meaning and decent. I couldn’t quite believe in the daughter’s ignorance of what her mother was sharing, or in the lawyer’s willingness to be so conveniently helpful.
I picked up The Burden (Agatha Christie, in her Mary Westmacott persona) from the library returns trolley and got through the first part the same day, and the rest of it the day after. It’s the story of the complicated relationship between two sisters; it starts out as a piece of devastating psychological realism (Christie is never sentimental about children or marriage) and goes totally bonkers in the third act. I would not have stopped reading it, though. Interesting data point for the “depiction of disabled character” files: the disabled character is appalling, but they are appalling before they become disabled and the experience does not reform them; they just become appalling in a different way.
Then I spent a lot of yesterday reading The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman) (Elizabeth Sandifer), a very long article which did a very good job of explaining to someone who never got into comics (no shade on people who did; I just find the combination of visual storytelling and all-caps text harder work than makes for an enjoyable experience) why Neil Gaiman is such a big deal, and how he got into a position to do and get away with what he did and got away with. 57000 words – that’s basically a book – and fascinating, although, of course, horrifying.
Having written all that out, I can’t help thinking of Granny Weatherwax’s adage that sin is treating other people as things. I can’t fit Elizabeth-Jane Burnett into that, though: you could say she treats moss as people, but I don’t see the harm in that.
Write a sentence longer than most people’s paragraphs.
Talk to a railway man.
Quote some dreadful Victorian slush.
Try to persuade the nearest soprano to sing some dreadful Victorian slush.
Photograph some buses.
Tell everyone you prefer trains.
Look at three different maps of the same place, none current.
Take the baby to look at trains.
Take a beermat home with you. Take six beermats home with you. (Or: be pleased that the beermat collection has gone to someone who appreciates it.)
Join the Friends of King Alfred Buses. (I have been meaning to do this for ages and have at least/at last managed to print off the application form.)
Yell ‘Trolloper!’ at the cat. (I didn’t, because it was five in the morning and the rest of the household was more or less asleep, despite the noise of the cat/waste paper battle.)
Read the lesson at Mattins. (I get one opportunity per year. I am on the rota.)
Remember the date. Tell people why it’s meaningful on a personal level. Although probably not in those terms.
(Two years without Pa, six months, nearly, with the little one.)
Kathleen Jowitt 