Present absences

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Thumb idly scrolling, alarm clock snoozing for the seventh time, my day is starting with a whimper and a sigh. I tell myself to move before my back locks completely, but even while I am telling myself sternly to get up and get going, I scroll on. On through posts that I ignore – plenty of them, rightly or wrongly; posts that make me laugh – sadly few of them; posts that make me angry; posts that make me hurt. There are a lot of those, and they lurk behind my eyelids for the rest of the day, popping out of my subconscious and into my internal monologues whenever I stop for long enough to take a breath.

What is it that makes me hurt? It’s not the crisis after incompetence after tragedy typhooning through the world, though that does me no credit, I know. Those are the posts that make me angry, and my responses are either avoidance or self-destruction, as they consume my mind in a blinding supernova of rage. No, the things that make me hurt are the day by day moments that are so much more creative, more joyful, more full than my days are. Is it jealousy? Probably, in part, if jealousy starts with your throat and your eyes and your hope and moves on to your tummy, inching its way by repetition to your heart. I know those are the good moments, the islands in the storm for others, just as they are when I post the same. And yet, that litany of pictures, of family adventures, positive Lockdowns, weight loss, planning a holiday, making a difference, speaking out, being brave, achieving goals, taking a risk and getting it wrong, and just plain living – that cumulative scrolling makes my heart ache and saps my will.

This is not a post bewailing social media. Of course people should share their joys, their sorrows, their hopes and failures, if that is what they want to do. Indeed, for those of us who are congenitally incapable of maintaining relationships over a distance, Facebook is a marvel and a delight for much of the time. But when the presence of something is an expected norm, unquestioned and unquestioning, how do you share its absence?

I was one of the first in my friendship group to have children, so I won’t speak like I’m an authority on what it feels like to have none when your body and your mind and your soul are tearing you apart with longing. People I love have shared their experiences with me – of the fear and the pain and the praying, the debt and the hope and the impossible choices, but it is not something I can directly speak to. At the other end of life’s glorious spectrum, I have lost a parent when most of my peers were still living with theirs. I know that moment of jarring reminder when someone asks “Where do your parents live?” I have seen the dawning horror on their faces as the conversation progresses. I answer about my Mum, and they ask whether Dad will be joining us too.* Now my Dad died many years ago, so, although it still makes me sad to think of all he is missing and of all the things I can’t share with him, mention of those things no longer makes me cry. So if I’m asked, I answer the question. To be honest, I usually answer it bluntly. And then the person I am speaking to is left with no idea, at all, of what to say next. Because how do you respond when someone tells you that they are outside the box you expect them to be in and, no matter how much you want them to, they will never go quietly back to being normal?

Normal. Isn’t that an awful term? As though there is something we all started out as, and any deviation from that is somehow an error. But if normal is white, cis-gender, heterosexual, in a stable relationship, with children, able-bodied and neurotypical, with no mental health concerns and no traumatic events in their past – if that is normal, then normal is an awfully small collective. And where does that leave the rest of us?

It leaves us living with absence. It may be small. It may be life-changing or hope-destroying. It may be dictated by circumstances or forced upon you by another’s actions. But let’s not forget that it may also be a blindingly positive, proactive choice. How do you celebrate small, with the things you did not buy, the waste you did not create, the plastic you did not use? Or celebrate big, with the choices you made to not follow that expected path and the joys it has given you in the execution of your own vision? Living a more sustainable life, materially and emotionally, is as much about positive absences as it is about the presence of future-looking actions. It is about the counter-cultural refusal to cash into a society that tells you that the way to protect our communities is to buy and to fly and to keep on moving, spending, updating. It is the rejection of the message that if you buy this or avoid eating that or go there, you will be full and have no absences, because they are bad and must always be hidden from view. 

Epidauros II by Barbara Hepworth. Negative space can be extraordinarily beautiful.

Absence is as real as presence in our lives. Sometimes it is more real than the furniture around us and the lives outside our windows that all look so very, very different to our own. It can be a fury-filled growl of silence and frustration; a blank canvas of waiting for something to happen; an exciting and life-giving explosion of self over expectation. If we could share those moments of absence without fear, or pain, or judgement, or apology; if we knew the whole of our selves could be seen, how could the world not be a better place?

*As a side note, please don’t do that. Don’t repeat language someone else has changed. It wasn’t an accident. They heard what you said and they changed it deliberately. If you ask about someone’s wife and in their response they use the word partner, or husband, or reply about themselves in the singular, that’s what you need to use too for the rest of your conversation.

Nothing to fear but fear itself?

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Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. 

Franklin D Roosevelt, in his 1st inaugural address, 1933

I wonder how the people who first heard this line felt when they heard it, before it became one of those overly misquoted sayings you hear but don’t really listen to. Listen to it carefully and it is ridiculous. And powerful. And baffling. It’s saying that really, we have nothing to fear: once you unmask your fears and find nothing behind them, then you are no longer afraid, just like a child who sees monsters hiding in the cupboards until she screams for her parents, and they, turning on the lights, reveal nothing but an empty dressing gown hanging on a wardrobe door. Reveal the shadow-filled dressing gown for what it is, and the child is free. Recognise terror as the makings of our own imaginings and it can no longer control us.

Franklin D Roosevelt with his wife. Picture courtesy of Wikipedia, fount of all knowledge.

The appeal of having nothing to fear is as old as the sensation itself, embedded in Psalms, poetry and Disney ballads alike; sung in the voices of angels and crooned in the whispered prayers of mothers leaning over their suckling babies and speaking mostly to themselves. It is immortalised in self-help manuals and spoken by monsters showing glimmers of humanity as only Shakespeare can pull off. It is as old as time and as fresh as the adrenaline you try to ignore as it pumps through your veins, your instincts screaming at you to fight or flee.

There is just so much to be afraid of. There will have been other times in history when simply stepping out of the front door could be seen as risking your life. There will be other times in the future, I hope, that the welfare of one is dependent on the kindness and care of all. But knowing there are other times it has felt like this does not diminish its impact now. Back in the heady early days of lockdown, when the world was a more innocent place, when we believed that two kilos of coffee would see us through, and we still thought Specsavers was the best place to go to test our eyesight, it felt like once we got through the peak, we would put fear behind us. Oh, how wrong we were. About all of those things, as it turns out. Now, as lockdown starts to ease, the fear is increasing in inverse proportion. Fear of taking part has running battles with fear of missing out. Fear of the unknown merges into fear of the over-familiar. Everyone I love is going to die meshes in with Lockdown is pointless and is Coronavirus so bad anyway? Are we over-reacting? Are we under-reacting? Are we doing both at the same time? We have been afraid for so long now that it is no longer possible to tell the difference between fear and frustration, between boredom and common sense.

Fear of a virus that lurks in the lungs of our loved ones, that tricks you into complacency and then lashes out with a summons to a ventilator, an ICU, a mortuary; that has become part of the New Normal, accepted and mocked in bizarrely equal measure. The reaction has been relatively unanimous worldwide, and utterly unimaginable even 9 months ago. Could we feel similar fear, have similar unanimous actions for other things? Could we react similarly in order to fight deaths by gunshot, maybe – which kill 400,000 people worldwide each year in “unlawful” killings alone? Does that not warrant worldwide unified action? What about the climate crisis? The WHO estimates that this will cause 250,000 additional deaths per year from around 2030 onwards; that feels like something it would be nice to avoid, something we should probably be worried about. Every decade, the changing climate will kill 5 times as many people as Covid-19. It may not have the immediate fear factor of an uncontrolled global pandemic, but its creepingly insidious nature looms like the shadow that is so familiar we have grown to ignore it, the volcano that may be theoretically alarming, with its grumblings and smoke-belching,  but will never be taken seriously because people have been whinging on about it for so long now. Fear can become so normal that you pretend it no longer exists, and flood to the beaches because the Prime Minister said it’s safe now, or fly away on holiday because anything is better than staying within these four walls for another day, or insist on everything being wrapped in throwaway plastic or bought new from the shops because we were wondering if we’d ever be able to do that again, or because our short-term terror overwhelms our long-running fear every time.

My fear of the virus is present but not strong. I am more worried about the repercussions a badly-managed lockdown will have on society. I am very afraid of the meltdown that climate change will precipitate in that same society, as everything we thought we knew is gradually eroded, crumbling like a scenic cliff-edge village into the inevitably rising sea. But the fear that overwhelms everything else in my subconscious is the fear that, after all this pain, and loneliness, and fear, that after all this, nothing at all will change. I have been saying throughout lockdown that I don’t know which I fear more: everything changing, or everything remaining the same. (I know I must have said it before as it made it into The Vicar’s sermon last week, and he only ever listens if I say the same thing 150 a few times…) My statement isn’t true anymore. I know where I stand now. I know what I fear, far more than fear itself. I fear losing everything to a global crisis we could all see coming and did too little to prevent, as much as I fear losing the insights into my own heart I have won through blood, sweat and blog posts over the last few gruelling and gloomy months. We could do something about changing the world if we wanted to – 2020 has punched us in the global solar plexus, winding us all with a single blow, demonstrating how interconnected the world is, how brutality in one continent influences policy in another, how we can only look on in awe at Mongolia whilst we pity the United States, how crises will only stay defeated if we stop passing them off as someone else’s fault. The thing I fear most is that despite everything we are not going to listen to 2020’s claxon call. That we might change for a while, but that over time, we will forget. We will forget the carers we clapped for, the lives we knelt for, the change we yearned for. We will forget what we hope for in the rush to return to what we think we have been waiting for. And by the time we stop for long enough to remember, it will be too late. The world will have returned to normal. Fear will no longer be an everyday bedfellow. It will fly away, holding tight to the hand of hope, and the only way we will ever see it again will be to take the second star on the right and keep going until morning.

We are all interconnected, after all, and all breathe each other’s air. Montage courtesy of Pixabay.

Because sometimes, fear is a good thing. Fear can lead to life-saving lifestyle choices. Fear can lead to acts of courage that seem like a dream when you relive them in endless retellings, as fear becomes bravery and fact becomes legend. Fear can lead to sacrifice and blessings beyond measure, because fear can be just the other face of hope. It is when we are most afraid that we draw most on hope: hope of finally having a forever family when you feared children would never be in your future; hope of surviving an earthquake when buried deep beneath the rubble; hope of a new life free from fear when you lead your children into a rubber dinghy and pray you will make it across the ocean. Hope is what keeps us all alive. Hope is what we need now more than ever. And if we sacrifice fear to complacency and mystery to the mundane, will we ever be able to pay the price?

Show us our darkness: A story of whiteness and privilege in the UK

Simply Messy1 Comment

You know those things you do even though you’re not sure they’re a good idea? This post is one of those. If you’re tired of hearing yet another white person talking about #BlackLivesMatter, don’t read on. This post is about my (white) thoughts, my (privileged) experiences, my fragility. It’s another white person making BLM all about them. If that’s not something you need right now, I totally get that.

So why am I writing this post, given my own ambivalence towards it, and the volatility of the subject? I’m doing it because the thing that has changed my understanding of this topic has been the first hand stories, heartbreaking and brutally honest, poured out, wept over, cursed and sworn at. Reading other people’s stories has helped me see what is really happening, hidden from my own viewpoint most of the time. I am writing this with the hope that my honesty can equal that of those other writers, that I can follow in their footsteps and lay down my tiny brick along this new way we are forging together.

A white girl, tear falling down her cheek, draws one half of a heart with a pencil. A girl in a hijab, also crying, draws the other half of the same heart with the same kind of pencil. The heart is unfinished.
An image that has spoken to my experience many times in the years since I first saw it, and that speaks to my experience again today.

I am not trying to speak for others, though the experience and stories of others has become a part of mine too, and will shape my own narrative. I am also going to try really hard not to whitesplain anything. And I’m pretty likely to get that wrong sometimes. If you have a better way to say these things, please share it. This is a learning piece for me; I do not understand this topic well. I am not familiar, or comfortable, with much of this language. But I want to learn, and I hope that, at least, will count for a little.

Going to Africa

A question frequently asked about privilege is “Have you ever been the only one who looks like you in a public space?” If you are black, Asian or minority ethnic in a white-majority country, you are often the only person who looks like you in a room, and this can feel threatening. My own answer to this question is also yes. I have been alone in that way. This first became true when I spent several months in Kenya. This was also what made me very aware of my own skin for the first time (I was in my 20s, so there’s privilege straight away). But this way round, I did not feel threatened. I felt uncomfortable in my white skin maybe twice in three months, when walking through unfamiliar villages, or crossing the Likoni ferry. Most of the time, when I was uncomfortable, it was because I was treated far, far too well, by people who knew nothing about me but the colour of my skin.

I went to the home of a colleague one afternoon, to help him with a piece of writing he had to do. As we were working, his very new wife came in, looked at me, and said “It’s true then.” I was ready for all sorts of accusations – who wouldn’t be, after that? Instead she said “They said I would be nothing. But here I am, married, and a white person is drinking tea in my house.” That’s what it took to have made it, in her mind. That comment was joined by others. We were called angels by children trying to touch out skirts. I was informed that in the queue to enter Heaven, rightly, the white people would go first. When just looking at me made a child cry (well, I have that reaction in plenty of other places too, but this was more extreme than normal) everyone hastened to make sure I was not upset by this. Even when asked how it could be possible to drink with noses as long as ours (possibly the best question I have ever been asked in my life 😂), it was asked with curiosity, shyness, and no judgement.

Living in Birmingham

Several years later, in a new phase of life, we lived in Birmingham and we learned A Lot. We were there, living in a vicarage, when Fox News (wrongly, clearly), pointed to Birmingham as somewhere that white people, and Christians, feared to go. Oops. We lived in an area where most middle class people, of any ethnicity, came in and did charity work during the day, then left at night before it got rough. There were stabbings in the park just beyond our back fence. We frequently found used needles and used condoms on our walk, just up the side of the church, to worship on a Sunday morning. I was mistaken for the local prostitute (she was also white, I’m told, and neither of us covered our hair). I took my children to an event of 200 people and we were the only ones there who looked like us. There were mutters, sideways looks, and a circle of space around us as if our whiteness might be catching. There were times in this stage of my life that I was treated differently, and treated as less than I had been before, based solely on the colour of my skin and the visibility of my hair. There were times, at this stage of my life, that I felt afraid.

And yet. I could get out of this place, go to church, go to Meeting, shop in the reinvigorated city centre, or visit the other side of town, and find plenty of other people who looked and thought and spoke like me. When the police knocked on our door (which they did quite a lot), it was to check we were OK, not check up on what we’d been doing. When The Paleontologist started school, she was one of only two white kids in the whole school, sure; but there were a lot more adults who looked like her around than there were who looked like the other children, so she never lacked understanding from her teachers or positive role models.

My life as a teacher

Time moved on again, as it has a habit of doing. We moved to a new parish and a new life, which for me meant becoming a teacher. Once again, I find myself the only person of my skin colour in a room. But I’m the one at the front, the one with the power in this room. I do not feel afraid. I find myself hearing my students’ stories and their jokes, laughing with them as they bash their weaves and, rolling their eyes, explain “it’s an African thing”. Laugh as though I’ve been there, as though I’ve also felt the need to cover the hair I was born with with something artificial and itchy to fit in with others’ expectations, just because I’ve been there so often when it’s happened that it’s started to feel like my story too. I enjoy the surprise when I say I’ve eaten ugali; I include pictures and names that look and sound like the students in the room; I celebrate Black History Month and try to ignore the knowledge that I am whitesplaining this to at least half the students in the room, as I speak about histories that have gone unwritten and wrongs that have gone unrighted, and I pick very carefully who I will make eye contact with as I’m talking. I tell students that they should give me the name they want to be called, not the one they think will be easy for me to say; but I don’t say this to everyone, and not everyone laughs. I teach about prejudice and am horrified when a student describes being asked not to work with particular patients as “criticism”, not the racism it is; and then I talk down a complaint made by the same student against me, justifying to myself that I am not talking her down because she’s black, but because she’s just really, really annoying. (This is honestly true. I’ve only lost my temper in front of a whole class once, and it was because this student deliberately destroyed an activity planned to benefit the whole community. That doesn’t change the fact that, after telling her she should speak out against injustice, I then silenced her, and won, to protect my own reputation.)

I am not saying this to say “Look at what I’ve done, look how good I am”. Neither am I saying it to rend my clothes and say how bad I am. I’ve done some things I’m proud of and some things I’m not. I’ve done some things I would change if I could, and others I would leave just as they are. We are all complex, more than our skin colour, more than what others make us or want us to be. This situation is more than a hashtag, more than a headline, more than slogans that can be shouted in a crowd. I have no answers. But I pray that, as in worship, sharing our stories can show us our darkness and bring us to new life. We all need to own our darkness. We all need new life. And we all need to get there together.

In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.
Wangari Maathai. Amazing on so many levels.

Tackling the Mountain of All The Things: when your best is only just good enough

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In the first week of the summer holidays, I often get a burst of energy, of Let’s Do This, of tidying fever. I dare to dream impossible dreams, of empty washing baskets and Lego-less carpets. As the weeks pass, the fervour diminishes and the wading through treacle-ness of keeping a family home habitable overcome my enthusiasm, resulting in an enormous sigh of relief when the holidays end and our cleaner (yes, I admitted it) comes back and sorts us out.

This pattern repeated with Lockdown, as the busyness and purpose of the first few days slowly melted into a puddle of sameness and a gradually increasing collection of dust in the corners and Haribo wrappers under the cushions. Now, however, Lockdown is slowly easing, and, like a whale in a long, slow dive, we are coming back up for air and bringing those seeds of energy with us. Seeds of energy coupled with being trapped in a house overwhelmed with Stuff has resulted in plunging into the sorting of children’s toys, clothes, books, drawings, games, letters, shoes and random plastic bits that have been building up around us for as long as we’ve been saying that we’re just not here enough to sort them all out.

The dream result is newly painted walls, black furnishings for The Paleontologist, All The Games for The Cowgirl, and endless empty, hooverable space for me. The reality involves rather a lot more gritted teeth through conversations about the absolute necessity of keeping another half-lost Kinder Egg toy, whilst simultaneously demanding to give away every item of clothing in the wardrobe. My cunning plan to find things to get rid of has worked very well. The part about actually doing the decluttering? Not so much. Here is the pile currently waiting to be removed. If I said this was all of it, would you believe me? (Spoiler alert: you shouldn’t.)

A single bed heaped high with a variety of clothes, books and toys.
Take one spare bed. Cover with 9 years’ worth of outgrown everything. Mix well and abandon to see what grows.

Faced with this mountain to dismantle, now feels like a good time to look again at decluttering strategies. It’s time for a radical approach, preferably one that comes with its own bulldozer. Never mind simplicity, sheer practicality says we must find new homes for things literally tumbling out of every storage crevice in the house. But sustainability says skips and dumps should be a last resort. So I thought I’d round up earlier resorts, to remind myself of the options and stop me hiring that skip. Well, stop me hiring it this week, anyway…

  • Car Boot Sales are a no from me, I’ll warn you now. The idea of getting up that early, and Being Cheerful into the bargain, in order to convince people to buy stuff I still care about a little is something I just couldn’t do, even without the social distancing and non-essential shopping rules currently still in force. Plus, it would probably rain.
  • Giving things to friends has to be my favourite way to declutter. In our early parenthood adventure years, we were given All The Things, a vast amount of which were beautiful, and some of which were, well, not. Not at all. (That’s just Vicarage Life With A Baby, in my experience.) As time went by and those delightful pooing vomiting bundles grew out of their Beautiful Things, it was a genuine joy to pass them on to other pooing vomiting bundles who were just starting out in life (and, yes, we passed on some of the rubbish too, naturally. What’s a little rubbish between friends?) Ironically, though, once the pooing and vomiting diminished and the grass and ketchup stains increased, the clothes swapping machines seemed to dry up too, at least in our household. Not so many Beautiful Things came in. Almost no Beautiful Things went out. We haven’t been able to get rid of our crap share our children’s outgrown outfits in this way for some time now.
  • Freegle is probably the best known sharing-stuff-you-don’t-want-anymore site. It has loads of people, endless offers of hangers and jam jars, and occasional scrums when people offer things that are actually still useful. I don’t know if I’d be more worried that our offcasts would set off a scrum or be ignored along with the blue and red plastic magazine racks, truth be told. Also, the app is clunky and people who say they want things don’t always turn up for them. This makes me a lot more reluctant to put things up there again.
  • Olio is similar in many ways, but I prefer how it makes me feel when I use it. The app is more fun, you can give away food as well as stuff, and in general the people who use it are terribly polite. (Probably due to the fact that it is mostly populated by middle class liberal lefties, it has to be said. Maybe that’s why I feel so at home there?) It is much smaller, though, which means there’s a good chance that the things you put up won’t actually be wanted by anyone close enough to you to make it worth picking them up, in sustainability terms or time and money ones.
  • Giving to charity shops is pretty straightforward (particularly if you just load up a collection bag and leave it outside your front door). Unfortunately, though, plenty of us are willing to give things to charity, but not enough people are willing to buy from them. So the things in charity shops build up, and build up. Sometimes they are shipped out to other countries because they can’t be sold here. Sometimes they are shipped to other countries and shovelled into recycling or rubbish tips once there because they are such bad quality no one would ever want to wear them again. So yes, sparingly, I like decluttering this way; but my current clutter-mountain is not what I would call sparing.
  • Facebook marketplace. I’ve done this once. Never, never again. The familiar platform is great, but you get an insane number of messages and the pressure is awful. My phone never stopped beeping and I started dreading yet another person showing interest. This is not a viable option for a fairly-overwhelmed introvert.
  • eBay is my preferred way of selling on used things, despite paying commission. You can donate some money to charity from the sales if you want to. You can let eBay do all the hassle of sorting out who is going to win things and how they will pay. But, you have to display things in a way that makes people want to buy them. You still occasionally have to talk to the people buying things. And you have to be able to make it to the Post Office regularly, which even without lockdown is rather easier said than done.

Looking at that picture, I feel so guilty. Guilty for buying so many things, some of which have never been worn, bought because they were on sale, or in charity shops themselves, or because they made me hope that one day I would be slim enough to wear them, or because they reminded me of something I used to love that fell apart. I feel guilty that we have so many toys that these can be removed without making a dent in the messiness of the girls’ rooms. I feel guilty that it’s all Still Here, that none of it has been given away already. But the fact is, being sustainable, even in a haphazard, messy way, is hard. It takes time. It takes emotional energy. It takes learning from mistakes and experience and accepting that some of the things you tried made matters worse, not better. It means realising that it is possible to be both part of the problem and part of the solution. It means doing your best, even when that isn’t enough, because it’s all we’ve got. So I’ll keep going with selling things to people who might enjoy them more than we have, giving them to people who would appreciate them, and avoiding Facebook Marketplace like the plague. And when all of this is over, I’ll look smug and tell stories of great daring, about the time I took on a decluttering mountain, and my best, as it turns out, was exactly what was needed.

Image from Pixabay

Sorry Sorry (for making your life a living hell)*

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The scene is exhaustingly familiar. Your chest is tight and it’s hard to take a breath, even though you have done nothing more physically taxing than running upstairs, downstairs, and in the children’s chambers, looking for far-flung reading records and misplaced swimming costumes, since the middle of last week. You realise you have two minutes spare so you look for a job to do, your hands flapping aimlessly, your mind unable to process the idea that two minutes without action will not cause it to blink out of existence after all. You are thinking about that meeting you just had that tripled your workload whilst questioning everything you thought you were told to do last week. Everywhere you look there is laundry, washing up, or unsorted children’s drawings, schoolwork, forms to be signed, and there is so much in front of you that you can only see a haze, your mind refusing to process the details or consider starting points for improvement. You nip upstairs to get something and forget what it was you came up for as you are confronted by unfinished decluttering projects, or wellbeing projects, or rubbish that never made it to the wheelie bin, lurking accusingly in the middle of the floor. And, when there is no more room for anything but a soundless explosion and a burgeoning mushroom cloud, the cry goes up from the sofa pushed way too close to the TV: “Mummmmaaay”. “Just a second” is gasped out through clenched teeth. But of course, no quarter is offered, no second’s recovery allowed. The cry goes up again, and again, and before you know it you are also standing too close to the TV, shouting in full dinosaur mode and demonstrating to your offspring how the grown ups do tantrums. Their eyes go round. The Cowgirl starts crying. The Paleontologist starts taking notes. You take a deep breath, and count to ten. Then count to ten again. Then you apologise for shouting. Because grown ups get it wrong as often as children do. We do bad things. We do things with the best of intentions, and as time goes by, it turns out they were bad things too. We tell our children that if they make mistakes and hurt people they must apologise, and then they watch us refusing to follow our own orders.

When did apologising for something become equated with weakness, failure, not trying hard enough? Why is it that, as a nation, we apologise when someone else bumps into us in a public place, but we cannot apologise when we have caused genuine harm?

Is it the fear of complaints, of an institution losing its reputation? Because let’s face it, that will happen whether we apologise or not. The only thing that will change is the grace our acceptance of fault might bestow, or the residual flavour of blame and cowardice that is left in the mouths of those we have let down. I think my hardest act as a teacher was to call a student I had already told had passed her exam. Standard internal checks demonstrated I’d got it wrong. Thankfully, this story had a happy ending, and the student was able to retake, and pass, her qualification. I felt awful: a disappointment who had seriously let a good woman down. But I got the chance, through owning up, through apologising, to make it right. What if I hadn’t done that? Had hidden behind the faceless MISandExams Department, or, even better, the geographically removed exam board? My avoidance would lead her to question the college more, to doubt herself, and cause her to delay her dreams for yet another year. Oh, and she would still have lost her respect for me. How could she not, when I had taught her, invigilated the exam, built a relationship through a long and tiring year, and not looked her in the eye when the time came for bad news?

Because nothing says sorry like cardboard figures dragging roses. Except possibly very cute cardboard figure dragging roses. Picture credit: https://pixabay.com/users/Alexas_Fotos-686414/

Politicians, it seems, never make mistakes. They never change their minds. And if they do, they never acknowledge they have done so. A lot of people would like Boris Johnson to apologise for promoting close physical contact with people with Covid-19, all those years ago when it was still March and lockdown hadn’t started yet. A lot more would like Donald Trump to apologise for the dangerously misguided comments he made about bleach and UV light. Will either of them do so? Of course not. But then again, how can they?

We have all contributed to this culture that considers apologies as a sign of weakness. An apology is made into a meme, which becomes a Nick Clegg-style video, which becomes the epitaph of any political position. Acknowledgement of personal error is lorded over the fallen opponent until the end of time, because an apology is a sign of weakness, and changing your mind is the act of a fool. If someone changes position they are greeted with a rousing chorus of “I told you so,” rather than “Absolutely. We agree. Let’s work together to fix it.” No wonder scientists are treated with such suspicion and confusion in the modern world. To accept that some things are not yet known, to breathe in uncertainty and enjoy finding out new questions, to change your opinion if others find evidence that those initial interpretations were wrong: these things are opposed to the very foundations of our self-belief.

We live in a time where the dark side of capitalism is raising its head with increasing regularity. The gap between the overfed and the starving grows all the time. Continuous global growth, if pursued with historically single-minded determination, will eventually come at the cost of the continuing existence of us all. But in this world of fear and frustration and the non-existence of the apology, people who believe that capitalism is the answer cannot change their minds, and people who oppose it would rather see the world burn than admit the innate worth of those they have classed as their opponents.

Of course, all of this is just my opinion. And there is every chance it’ll turn out that I’m wrong. If I am, I’m sorry. It’s my best opinion at this time. If you disagree, and it turns out you’re right and I’m wrong, I won’t hold it against you. I hope you won’t hold it against me either. Instead, let’s find a way to work together to make things better for us all.

*If you know this song, I expect you to now be dancing around singing to it. Doing just that has got me through more crises at work than I care to remember now. Though admittedly, it was a slightly unusual number to insist we had played at our wedding…

Angels with dirty faces

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that the act of being observed changes the occasion under the microscope. By monitoring the food you eat, you change what you consume, and when, and why, and how. By sitting in a classroom surrounded by more paperwork than is present at an amateur writing convention, you change the lesson you are watching and constrain or inflame the relationships that make it come alive. And by considering a blog post of each day as it passed, you anchor yourself in the moment, to the passing of time, and to the repetitive, beautiful, mind-numbing moments that make up family life in isolation.*

A diary with the title
Oh, the irony…

Lockdown with children: an exhausting joy

Family lunch in the garden = lockdown summer holiday

Lockdown begins and ends with the consciousness that, every minute of every day, we are responsible for the care and stability of our offspring. In many ways, I am very lucky. My children are old enough, able-bodied enough and grounded enough to take care of most of their basic needs independently. In the course of lockdown, they have even improved dramatically, if reluctantly, in everything from unloading the dishwasher to getting themselves dressed. They like playing together more than they like being apart, and they both sleep well and wake up late. I’m winning at lockdown parenting. And yet, even with all these odds lined up in my favour, it’s really, really hard. As I write this, hiding under the duvet in the spare room, a part of my brain is listening out for the next crisis, the next drama, the next reason to leave what I need to do to maintain my own equilibrium and dig out my whistle once more. Every certainty they thought they had – that school will always be there for the hating, that only grown ups do the boring chores, that even if the world is ending you are not allowed on the trampoline in your pajamas – has crumbled around them, and however awesome they are, they cannot keep themselves stable alone for any length of time.

Photo taken just before the umbrellas at dawn fencing competition started…

There have been some magnificent moments too. Being an entirely 21st century parent, these are, of course, the ones I have caught on camera. Being in the house, no excuses, no distractions, has given us the opportunity to make good memories, as well as more grey hairs. We have built a den. In fact, we’ve built several. We’ve done baking. They have gone jumping in puddles; I have not. We have experimented with more-dramatic-than-planned new looks and had make up and nail painting and flossing lessons (the dental kind, not the dancing kind, at The Paleontologist’s repeated request). We have spent endless afternoons in the garden and the girls have mastered flips on the trampoline, as every neighbour within a mile’s radius can probably attest. We have laughed hard and been terribly silly, and we have all eaten an utterly absurd amount of sugar.

Inside…
…and outside. Not quite sure why it’s Halloween and Christmas already in this den. I couldn’t quite bear to ask!

Working from home, or surfing through survival?

The second inescapable fact of lockdown in this house is that both of us have jobs, vocations, and obsessions with people-focused work. Church services with no congregations; lessons with no students; Quaker worship over Zoom (who knew a video of thirty people sitting silently waiting could be so moving, and so noisy?). All these things can be done, and they are done, and done as well as we possibly can. But they take so much energy. There is so much scope for one little thing – preparing a workpack late, or accidentally muting a service on YouTube – to adversely affect so many people. Hardest of all is that when you are there, in person, worshiping, preaching, teaching, you get energy back from those around you. It goes round and round and breathes sustenance into everyone it touches. Alone with a computer screen, none of that is possible. This is a finite solution, and the cracks are deepening, as broken as our back lawn was before the rains finally came.

My view during Quaker Meeting this morning #nofilter #filthycarpet

Trying to take photos of my working life as a teacher during lockdown has lead me to acknowledge the good, the bad, and the actually quite dangerous. The thing that comes through clearer than anything else will always be that this is a juggling act. Most of the time, it’s my work that gets dropped. Sometimes, it’s not. Most of the time, it’s just another thing to try and keep in the air.

A messy desk with a laptop in the foreground.
Team meetings and monitoring assignments happening simultaneously. Me, jealous of everyone outside under that amazing blue sky? Why would I be jealous?!
A child's hand, caked in wax, in the foreground. In the background is a work computer.
This is what happens when you have children who are helping out in church services in the same house as parents who are working. Disclaimer: no Paleontologists were harmed in the taking of this photo. In fact, she was rather proud of herself…
In the foreground are workbooks and a purple pen. In the background is a trampoline. It is a beautiful sunny day.
Marking whilst “supervising” trampoline time. It’s not all hard work.

Lockdown and simplicity: focusing on the wins

Plastic free shampoo. Finally. I’ve been toying with the idea of using this for years, and have finally mixed it up…

It will be easy, my brain said. Let’s make a list of all the projects we can do, I said. We’ll be stuck in the house and can finally make a start on living a more ethical lifestyle, I genuinely believed. And, in some ways, we have. For example, we have managed to do much of our shopping from local suppliers – helped by the fact that they did not run out of flour or eggs, even when everyone else did, as well as that they bake the most astonishing chocolate brownies this side of heaven.

Delivery from The Good Loaf. Practically perfect.

Books. Oh, I do love books. As you will probably have guessed already, in fact. And one of the things that has made me most stressed since moving to this vicarage (yes, genuinely) has been that when we unpacked, we just dumped all the books on the nearest bookshelf to clear away the boxes, figuring we’d sort them out later. Turns out that by later, we meant in four years time when the whole country was in lockdown. Also turns out that as jobs go, this may be one I regret starting. Still, at least it’s given me the prod to set aside a fair few books for decluttering once the charity shops open again. Job done. Or at least, job will be done fairly soon when I finish clearing away the final pile to be sorted…

A few of our non-fiction books, roughly sorted and waiting to go back on the shelves.

Ultimately, lockdown has been harder than it has been easy; infuriating more than it has been fun. At no point have I questioned that it’s the right thing to be doing. At many points along the way we’ve all had an absolute ball. But anyone who thinks it’s not going to leave us all wiser, weaker women is, I think, missing something crucial in all of this.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so amazing to me right now as grown up food, eaten alone and uninterrupted in the sun.

*Full disclosure: this is not, actually, a day by day account. It was intended to be, but then life got messy, as it so often does, and I ended up losing a week by blinking and sneezing at the same time (or maybe just by finally becoming accustomed to the not-so-new-anymore normal) and my plans changed. Oops.

Will lockdown today shape the privilege of tomorrow?

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I have a love-hate relationship with my phone at present (she says, whinging on about screen-time whilst re-editing a blog post). I have done better at leaving it in rooms where I am not than I have done for years, accepting the cost of fewer memory-making photos as worth it for a less-conflicted attention span. At the same time, it is the only thing that reminds me that a world beyond my walls and garden fences actually exists, and is kind of struggling right now.

Yesterday, I was hiding under the dining room table and catching up with Facebook, and came across the piece by Altogether Mostly which has rightly gone viral.* The post redraws the lines of our time and our priorities, pointing out what many of us feel instinctively is true: that missing a few days, or even a few months, from school will be far less damaging than the lessons our children will learn in this time of global shutdown. To take responsibility for filling their own time. The realities of what it takes to run a home, and how even adults don’t think it’s fair when they have to do the same, really boring, housework every day. That genuine relationships are bloody hard, particularly if you can’t just get away from them for a few hours until your head calms down. That it’s not always possible, and it’s very rarely the answer, to just buy another one or a different one or a bigger one. That Daddy cooks as well as Mummy does and makes far more child-friendly food (particularly if you live in a house with a Daddy who suddenly doesn’t have evening meetings every night, and who shares his daughters’ belief that lentils are the only food that will be readily available in Hell). That those who are really essential are not the people who are paid the most, but are the ones we draw rainbows for. That grown ups are better at Scribble Head and “Made you Look” than children are, but these are skills that can be mastered with extensive practice. That it is possible, even when it’s hard, to be still, and listen, and hear a something that is beyond the everyday noise that streams forth for every other minute of the day.

https://pixabay.com/images/id-734436/

A lifetime ago, in a galaxy far far away, Star Wars (Episode IV) was the first film I have any memory of watching (whilst hiding behind the coats at the entrance of Darth Vader). One of the unexpected joys of Lockdown has been watching through the saga with my own children (who built themselves mountains of cushions to hide behind at the entrance of any of the Darths). Lockdown, once we settled into it, has not lead to the doom and gloom feared, in this house at least. Life has felt more relaxed; there is more time for sitting in the garden and for saying Yes (whilst hiding behind the coats at some of the consequences); more laughter, and more laughter together; less pressure of expectations and comparisons and school hours and rush hour traffic jams.

Being in lockdown makes it even harder than normal to remember that the experiences of those outside this sun-drenched dreamy bubble are carrying on in a way that is utterly different, and far less privileged, than ours; and that those who have nothing to say that fits within the all-pervasive artificial filters of social media are being silenced by default. The golden-tinged experience of lockdown dreamed of by Absolutely Mostly may be how it is for my kids – on my good days, on their good days. It won’t be how it is for kids of NHS staff, separated by fear and exhaustion from the people who care for everyone else and, as a result, are unable to care as fully for the ones they themselves love the most. It won’t be how it is for the kids of the key workers – the delivery drivers, checkout assistants, refuse collectors – who are keeping us alive and healthy but are applauded only as an afterthought. It won’t be the case for kids whose parents are breaking down or breaking up or forcing themselves to stay together, overcome by unbearable hopes or unfightable fears. It won’t be the experience of the kids who would do anything to avoid the inescapable attention of their carers, or their siblings; or of those trapped within the temporary security of a bedsit, a room in a B&B, a refuge where nothing is familiar and the sounds of strangers echo on every side.

It is an amazing ideal that somehow this experience will make our children stronger, happier, the leaders of the future. It gives hope that there is a purpose in all this; that, like in Star Wars, we’ve got some rubbish to get through and some of our comrades won’t make it, and that will hurt – but ultimately, good will overcome evil, a plucky band of all-powerful goodies will make everything OK again, and it will all have been worth it. But who, in this scenario, is the Empire? It isn’t Covid-19. That, confounding the overarching narrative of the day, is not the evil to be overcome but is, in truth, the thing that is allowing us to fight back. The thing that is constraining and tormenting us is a darkness that has been present in our lives for much longer. It is, as Luke Skywalker discovered, a more intimate, personal darkness that hides behind masks of our own making and forces us to live lives we never chose or wanted. We have no one but ourselves to blame for the lives we are not missing, now that we have been forced to leave them at the front door and wish they were not there, waiting to catch us up in their shadows, when we walk that way again. We have no one to blame but ourselves. So, when this is all over, what are we going to do about it? And how will we make sure that it is something that, unlike our current experiences, genuinely does not discriminate; something that we can all overcome, together?

Still from The Empire Strikes Back, interpreted as I want to, with no reference to the official line. And no reference to Episode IX either, please, as we couldn’t get a babysitter and so haven’t seen it yet (sob).

*At the end of all this, incidentally, I think there needs to be a petition to get the inventors of Sleeping Lions and Hide and Seek onto the next Honours List. Absolutely genius, both of them.

Riding the limbo rollercoaster

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It is the best of times, it is the worst of times; it is the age of outpourings of Facebook-fuelled generosity, it is the age of stockpiling, panic-driven selfishness; it is the epoch of global awareness, it is the epoch of fake news; it is the coming of Spring, after a winter of floods and wildfires; it is a fridge full of fresh vegetables about to decay, it is reaching for the tinned beans because cooking takes energy that ran out a geological age ago; it is the era of memes of hope, it is the era of gifs of despair. It is a time of limbo, of contradictions, of explosive numbness. It is Lockdown: week 2.

A black and white image of a girl, with a background of line-drawn clocks disintegrating into smoke around her.
Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay

No commute into work means that my regular Radio 4 news catch-up now only happens during my blurry semi-sleeping morning resurfacings, and so I am getting most of my news from social media and Newsround (which probably actually makes it quite balanced, though knowing The Paleontologist, there’s no guarantee that the Newsround episodes she’s watching aren’t from several months ago). Social media encourages me to luxuriate in the quality time now suddenly available with my loved ones, and I am excited by the change in pace and in focus and in priorities within the Western world. It simultaneously reminds me that there are oceans of darkness around us, of intensive care units filled with fathers, with sisters, with daughters; of those who are desperate enough to flee their homes into this locked-down society because this is still safer for their children than the communities they are leaving behind; of those desperate and unable to flee the homes that are defined as the only safe havens allowed, but where they will never feel safe, be safe, even be able to stay alive if they remain for as long as this may take. Social media shows me that the most stressful and unifying event in the daily calendar is PE with Joe Wicks; it reminds me of moments of joy and light-hearted mockery; I see crafts I would love to try, and games I am happy to steal, and helps me to stop and focus on the pieces of my heart that share this home with me and make the world a better place. It does all of this while making me feel that I should be baking more, and exercising more, and loving more, and gardening more, and singing more, and painting more, and just Being More. It says “Trust your gut. You’ve got this” while your gut is screaming at you that, whatever else you have (and you quite possibly have plenty) one thing you have not got is This.

Things change and change again, flickering between emotions quicker than a five year old gets bored. There are times (though not that many, as the Age of the Introverts has finally arrived) when I am desperate for any kind of adult company, only to find myself switching off my phone later the same day because I’m all Zoomed out. I’ve never hoovered my home this often, and yet I am driven even more distracted than usual by the piles of paper and cobwebs clouding up every corner. I want to spend our days making and experimenting and playing, but I also want my kids to learn independent time-filling control, which they do quite happily, when I let them, with screen time and convoluted games full of arguments and American accents and make-believe relationships that just don’t need me any more. I turn to binge-eating to avoid facing reality at a time when food is scare and protein-rich comfort food is almost non-existent. I seek others to mourn and grieve and despair with when the world I have railed against comes crashing to a halt.

And so I find myself both loving this time of pausing and dreaming and relaxing, and scared and angry and tense about what can possibly end this limbo. I teeter between absolute joy and utter despair. I try to ride this rollercoaster because at least a rollercoaster moves, even if this one moves only in a continuous seamless loop, a snake of time and timelessness swallowing its own tail. A lot of the time I laugh. Sometimes I scream. And always I look backwards, forwards, sideways, anywhere but right in front of my eyes. If life is what happened while we were making other plans, what else can we do to enjoy this limbo life we are all living right now?

A rainbow of grief and hope and memories of me trying to look after two much smaller munchkins on my own, many years ago. The carpet was never the same again, but it’s always felt worth the sacrifice.

Busy doing nothing: the first 5 days.

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Day 1. The Cowgirl comes in at 6:30am (second time that night) with an ouchy tummy. My sleep-fogged brain finally puts together all the pieces and we work out this is an all-too-familiar list of events, which results in a call to the doctor and antibiotics for a urine infection. Normally this means a day of Netflix, sleep and Calpol, and then back to normal. Today it resulted in a text message by 8:30am reminding us that, because urine infections come with a fever, the family is officially locked in for 14 days.

First I refused to believe it, running through everything I wanted to get done before this happened. Then came relief: at least now we knew what the next 14 days had in store. That was closely followed by guilt and a morning spent in Skype, email and Google Classroom as I watched my colleagues trying to plug holes and fight fires as we locked down the college for the academic year, with no exams complete and no certainty of whether this is entirely practicable or a massive over-reaction.

By lunchtime, we can breathe again. Calls have slowed, children have settled, antibiotics have been fetched. We have more food in the house than we had at Christmas, nothing has run out yet, and there are flowers and sunshine.

The evening arrives and I’m buzzing. Life is good and so are the people around us. My colleagues have delivered my left-behind marking; The Vicar’s colleagues have delivered the most beautiful duck eggs you’ve ever seen, and soil-encrusted potatoes from the local market. The paramedics have also revised their opinion: with The Cowgirl responding as expected to antibiotics and given The Vicar’s key-worker status we are given the all clear for him to leave the house if necessary. We are good.

Home working meets home schooling meets our kitchen table, clear for the first time since… well, possibly since we moved in.

Day 2. Can it really only be day 2? This time last week everything was still pretty much normal. How can things possibly change this much in a week? Within the house, life is manageable, apart from occasional gripes when told that we can’t use the playground and a moderate panic from me until I work out that what sounded like dry coughing from the living room was actually just The Paleontologist putting lanterns into her Minecraft mansion. Seriously – who knew the two things could sound so alike? Outside The World’s wheels continue to turn. Fears abound and people continue to behave like idiots. But self-isolation works both ways, and we are as isolated from that as others are from our temperatures.

Rainbow crystals take 1. These followed the recipe. The others did not. They are not quite so pretty…

Day 3. It’s Mothering Sunday. Church and Meeting are in enforced lockdown; we join Zoom so that we can take part in Meeting, catch up on worship on Facebook Live, and take the timer off Facebook so that it stops telling me this is contradicting my digital wellbeing. The sun is shining; the blossom is blooming; The Cowgirl is experimenting with endless rainbow crystal test tubes. All around us people are struggling and suffering and stressed and I am feeling pretty guilty that I am not.

My students have told me before that it is only in England that the work-life balance is so bad that you cannot shop for fresh produce every day. What habits will we all form in this time of enforced idleness? And will we want to return to our great busyness when society returns to normal? There are times that it feels like this is a giant reboot, turning society off and on again. I am aware that there will be many who are unable to trust that this is an answer to prayer. I am aware that there will be times when I cannot feel that myself, and I am aware that I am very lucky that right now isn’t one of them. But we have been praying for years for something to disrupt the destructive, cataclysmic societal structures that are draining the lifeblood of existence on earth. Prayers are very rarely answered exactly how we would like them to be. Is it just possible that this time, they are being answered like this?

Mothering Sunday flowers. I present to you the New Normal.

Day 4. It’s Monday. Schools are shut and we’re juggling children’s activities with trying to maintain a normal work timetable. This is not going well. The morning was pretty productive and the children were cheerful. The afternoon was productive in a very different way: mostly productive of tears. And screaming. And The Paleontologist pretending she’s 15 and storming off to her room, slamming every door along the way. 8:30pm brings the news of Shutdown 2.0 from Boris Johnson, and the day ends with whiskey and chocolate on the sofa. The Vicar’s phone pings continuously from those who can no longer look to any form of church to sustain them when they need it most. His face greys out as the evening progresses and he gives all he doesn’t have while mourning himself for what has been ripped away from the core of his being. There are many who are screaming tonight, as the candles, lit at 7 to show hope, are blown out one by one.

Our joint plan for avoiding going stir-crazy. And to stop me spending all day hiding away with nothing but a bottle of gin and my phone.

Day 5. The cracks are deepening and blood is starting to seep through. There have been tears, tantrums and misunderstandings galore. The kids haven’t been coping brilliantly, either. Things ease once the morning chaos is past, though – the sunshine continues to help us out massively, a local independent bakery are doing home deliveries of chocolate brownies, and school have sent out colouring activities instead of research tasks this morning. This too will pass. All will be well.

As close as we can get to holy ground, in The Room Formerly Known As The Dumping Ground.

Smiling, Spring and Coronavirus: keeping pandemonium in perspective

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Spring landed this morning. The sky was endlessly, brilliantly, blue, bigger and brighter than it has been for months. The grass was uncomfortably luminous, real life filters making it too bright for eyes used to winter dullness. The glorious yellow of the blooming daffodils was matched only by the golden arms of the JCBs, carving out new foundations next to still-waterlogged floodplains. Blossom, too heavy now to be contained in scent-stuffed blisters, burst forth in transitory wonder. And driving through this cacophony of new life, my heart is crashing and my tummy is exploding with tension; a volcano transforming my focus and sapping my mind.

We all live in bubbles. Most of the time, we ignore their presence, looking out through their soapy rainbow walls at a world filtered for us by our own prejudices, seeing everything as though it fits perfectly with our own expectations. But every now and again – in elections, in pandemics, when meeting the family of a new and beloved partner – bubbles crash into each other and can no longer remain invisible. At these crunch points, we have a choice. Do we stay within our bubbles, shoring up the walls and hoping it will be enough to keep out the threat creeping towards us? Do we attempt to burst the opposing force in order to maintain our own security? Do we create a double bubble, the sides gelled together, though each remains integral to itself?

The thing that is most exhausting for me in this time of fear-fuelled headlines and anxiety-provoking bulk emails are the bridges between my bubbles. I have one for home, another for work. One for Quaker Meeting, and an adjacent one, sometimes attached, sometimes a lifetime apart, for Church. I carry these identities within me all the time, and the nothing moments, when I switch from teacher to mother, from daughter to counsellor, from worshipper to Vicar’s Wife, are always the points of my day when surges of energy rush me with adrenaline and exhaust me from my painted toenails through to my split ends. In normal times it can be overwhelming; and these, of course, are not normal times.

Keep calm and carry on is engrained – after all, we don’t want to make a fuss over nothing. Have a cup of tea and let everyone else whip themselves into a flap clashes in mid-thought with memories of those around me I know are immunocompromised, or over 70, or pregnant. My natural instinct to be a raging hypochondriac sits in chattering conflict with my deep-seated need to write off as suspect anything promoted by Boris Johnson. Wanting to do my job and do the best I can by my students, labouring over planning and guiding and marking and feeding back, is suddenly the worst thing I can do, and to help them the most I need to leave them alone. Together we learn the new language of self-isolation and social distancing, too new still to come up on the spellcheck. Every day I hear new myths, covering racism, justifying prejudice, anticipating financial hardship. All of it is based on fear masquerading as fact. All of it is spoken with authority and without understanding.

The world, for many, has been flipped inside out, and I feel buffeted along with it. If we cannot trust each other enough to not hoard toilet paper, how will we get through this together? (I was sitting smug on this one until it occured to me that our upcoming delivery from Who Gives A Crap will be sitting outside our front door all day, if it’s delivered at all. I never worried about other people walking off with it before – after all, it’s a box big enough for The Cowgirl to turn into a café, filled with nothing but toilet roll. All of a sudden, I feel a bit like I’m leaving gold dust in the front garden all day…) I won’t finish with advice I’m not sure I can follow either. Instead, I will share the three things I have learned today, and let tomorrow take care of itself.

  1. Don’t be like me. Be like The Vicar.* When the news updated us to leave the house only for essentials and work, I bought vegetables and withdrew cash. He bought a case of wine and visited the sick in hospital. It’s all about priorities.
  2. Don’t sing Happy Birthday. Unless it is your birthday, of course, at which point, indulge as much as you can in the singing, as now is not a good time for parties. Instead of singing, say the Lord’s Prayer. I have found little that helps me slow down, be mindful, and hope, as much as that.
  3. Stop. Talk. Share idiotic stories – from a distance of 2 metres, naturally. My introverted nature is close to dancing for joy at the idea of having a legitimate reason to enforce personal space, but even I’ve been talking to people that I would normally just smile at and move on. This is a time when we need every connection we can make, and actually, it’s lead to some great conversations. And the discovery that security tagging Extra Mature Cheddar is a thing. But mostly, it’s made me smile, and I for one needed more of that.
A screen filled with white and blushing pink blossom.

*I decided my husband needs a name on here, rather than just being defined by his relationship with me. After all, I’m very aware how frustrating that can be. I’m going to get in trouble for this name, as it isn’t technically his current job title. But hey, this is my blog, so I’ll stay a Vicar’s Wife, and he will stay The Vicar.