Tag: personal

Daily Decoration: portraits of unknown ladies

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Two decorations representing Tudor ladies, one in purple and one in white, hanging on a Christmas tree

I don’t know who these ladies are. They might be two of Henry VIII’s wives; they look rather Tudor, with their stand-up collars and what might be meant to be French hoods. It doesn’t matter. The galleries are full of portraits of unknown ladies; why shouldn’t I have a couple on my Christmas tree, too?

The reason that I don’t know who they are is that I bought them in Oxfam, so they had no labels. They came together with the King of Hearts. Or it might have been the Knave of Hearts. I can’t remember. I bought them last year, in Ely Oxfam. But how could I have bought them last year? All the shops were shut last year. Or I didn’t go to any shops last year. Then maybe it was the year before. Did we go to Oxfam when we were househunting? No. It was last year. I know that really.

It’s just that my mind wants to shuffle all occasions involving shops out of 2020. It’s already refusing to believe that I was only in the office on one day between 13 March 2020 and 16 August 2021: four months of the London commute have overwritten all of that. Give it a couple of years and I’ll be convinced I bought these ladies in 2021, and I’ll be reading back through this blog and learn that no, this year they came out of the Christmas box, and surprise myself.

That used to happen a lot before pandemic times; it’s even more the case now, with so many points of reference disappeared or eroded. I’m glad I got a lot down on paper or pixels, whether in public here or in private elsewhere on the internet or offline; it’s been good to be able to check my internal memory against my external memory, to see where I’ve stretched out one nice week into a glorious month, where I’ve moved an event from April to August, where I was massively excited about something I’ve since forgotten, or the first signs of what turned out to be the next major enthusiasm.

Sometimes I read something and think it could have been written by a different person, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s right there in my own handwriting. Sometimes I discover a revelation written down that I’d swear I’d only just had, but no, apparently this is something I’ve discovered before, and thought was important enough to record. Sometimes it’s plain reassuring, to see that I’ve been here before and found a way out again. That I’ve been here before several times and get better at finding my way out every time. I’m glad I record things.

Mind you, if I didn’t, would I ever know how wrong I can be about my own life?

Daily Decoration: a tiny crib scene

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Copper/bronze tinted plastic ornament representing Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus under a Gothic arch

This is the oldest ornament that I can show you, the one that’s been in my life the longest. Oh, back in the family Christmas boxes you might find a paper roundel decorated with gummed coloured shapes by me, or the white apples we always fought each other to put on the tree, but this is the earliest one that belonged to me and only me.

It was given to me by one of the residents in the care home in Malvern where my great aunt Silvia spent the last several years of her life. I don’t remember the name of the lady who gave it to me (note to parents: no, it wasn’t Miss Plain), or what she looked like, and I’ve no idea why she wanted to do that (it wasn’t anywhere near Christmas, I don’t think), beyond, I suppose, the fact that she thought I might like it.

I did. For a long time I didn’t think of it as a Christmas ornament; it sat on a shelf with all the resin hedgehogs and snowstorms that you accumulated if you were a small girl in the nineties. It’s suffered a little over the years. I think that once upon a time there might have been a hanging loop on top. Joseph came loose and had to be glued down again, and now Mary has come off and there isn’t quite room to put her back where she should be. And baby Jesus’s straw is ever so dusty and I’m not sure I can clean it.

None of that matters. What I see when I look at it is the kindness.

And so I’m thinking today about all those tiny kindnesses, the sort that might be forgotten, or half-remembered, whether by the giver or the receiver, the sort of which you could fit thousands and thousands into a lifetime.

If you’re celebrating today, a very merry Christmas to you. If not, I hope you’re enjoying a nice peaceful Saturday.

Daily Decoration: the Holy Parakeets

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Playmobil tree with two parrots and a toucan perched on the branches, in front of a Playmobil Nativity stable.

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.

But that’s fine. We’re nearly, nearly there.

Daily Decoration: Christmas tree

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Undecorated, bushy evergreen tree standing in the corner of a room.

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.

Daily Decoration: shining sun

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Carved and gold-painted wooden sun face hanging from an evergreen tree

This magnificent sun is another triumph of Guildford charity shopping days. I thought I’d share it in honour of the solstice.

I haven’t seen much of the sun today. There was a tiny patch of blue sky visible through grey clouds when I went out for my morning walk; the rest of it has just been plain grey. Even sitting in front of the east-facing living room window, where I’ve been working the last week or so, there wasn’t any sun to be seen.

And oh, goodness, dark days are hard. Working from home makes things a bit easier, in that I can just about get away with staying in bed until sunrise (8.06am today, though I was actually up at 7am), but I think it might make the afternoon slump worse. And certainly as soon as the sun goes down I lose all motivation and energy. Which is annoying, when there are things I’d like to do with my life besides work.

I don’t think I quite got the balance right this year. I made some experiments that didn’t really work out. Writing ten thousand words in two days got that particular project moving again, but wiped me out for anything else; and staying on writing duty for an entire month didn’t work at all. Firstly, four writing weeks doesn’t automatically result in twice as much content as two writing weeks. Secondly, I couldn’t really enjoy anything else. I’d have done better to have taken every other day off and gone to the cinema. I went to the cinema on Friday and, even wiped out as I am, I am suddenly a whole lot more enthusiastic about all of it.

It’s all useful data, though. Next year I’m going back to half and half: writing from full moon to new moon, and doing other things from new moon to full moon. (It’s as good a way as splitting things up as any, and the moon phases are in every engagement diary.) As for what the sun does, well, that’s a different question. All I really know is that I need to be more gentle with myself when there isn’t very much of it. But from tomorrow, we get more. And more, and more, and more.

Daily Decoration: Advent candle

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A red candle marked with gold figures up to 24. It has burned down as far as the figure 19. In the foreground, a cardboard angel holds a banner saying FEAR NOT.

‘Ah,’ said Tony, ‘it’s the candle.’

‘Mm?’

‘Something in my brain said, ah, that’s Christmas. It’s the smell of the candle.’

He has a point. For those of us who spent a lot of time in churches in our childhood, candles smell of Christmas all by themselves; there’s no need to add pine or cinnamon and put it in a fancy jar. Although I’m not sure how he hasn’t noticed it before, because, as you see, I’ve been burning this one all through Advent. And in fact it isn’t Christmas yet.

We buy each other chocolate Advent calendars, but I get the candle for myself. I have a fairly well-defined set of preferences. Not white – which usually, as this year, means red. Not conical (I made that mistake one year and regretted it as the time to burn through each number increased daily). Not too hideous. This one’s pretty good, though it could have done with some blank space at the bottom. As things stand, I’m going to have to take it out of its bottle before I get down to 24 and put it in some sand or something. I’d rather not risk cracking the glass.

The bottle is something of a hero of antiquity. It dates from my student years – 2006, to be precise. It says so on the side, courtesy of an Exeter University Methodist and Anglican Society glass painting evening. 2006 was the year I graduated. This year’s Freshers were born the year that I was a Fresher.

This September we went down to the West Country: took the sleeper to Penzance and worked our way back up again on a selection of trains and buses. Excellent fun (I particularly recommend taking the open-topped bus around Land’s End). We stopped off at Exeter and went to Evensong at the university chapel, eighteen years (give or take) after we first met there. A lot has changed – the choir, for a start, is a lot more competent and a lot tidier than we ever were; the room where I painted that bottle has been taken out of use, except for storage – but I had a very strong sense that the important things were still the same.

The glorious ceiling. The high clear windows. Radcliffe responses and Greater love hath no man.

Or, perhaps, the same but more so. The singing better, the choir robed, the new scholars inducted with a formal blessing. The implicit inclusion of queer Anglicans made explicit.

A sense of a beginning.

Daily Decoration: lights outside

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Metal railings with blue-white fairy lights twined around them and cascading down them. In the background a candle is burning in a window

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.

Daily Decoration: bi pride bauble

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A bauble covered in sequins arranged in stripes of pink, purple and blue

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.

Daily Decoration: Christmas card bauble

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Bauble covered in overlapping cardboard scales in shades of gold, deep blue and pale pink

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.

Daily Decoration: red glass frog

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Small frog made of red glass, with a hanging loop of blue wire wrapped around its waist

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.

Early last year my vocation walked out on me, the way it had in 2007, except this time it stopped to say goodbye. And I asked:

So what do you want me to do?

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?