Tag: Vicarage life

Slugs and snails and saving-the-world tales

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It is time to face facts. I can no longer deny this fundamental truth about myself. I have become, to my horror and despair, one of Those People. I have entered into an eternal, doomed fight to the finish with a breed of monster which consumes all within its path, killing the things that keep it alive with no sense of self-preservation or restraint, and I am forever lost. I have become a Slug Hunter.

I’ve never been much of a gardener, choosing instead to enjoy the finished results with no real understanding of how they were achieved. Indeed, in one church-owned home in my past, a wonderfully green-fingered parishioner came for a garden party and was cast into such a mire of despair at my gardening handiwork that she was pruning back the roses within ten minutes of arriving. But this year, I felt differently. I invested more. I took the time to clear the ground; I picked stones out of waterlogged earth and used them to wall off different sections of my soon-to-be-planted herb garden; I dug in fresh compost to enrich and break up the clay-heavy soil; I lingered in garden centres to choose the best options to plant, not just the cheapest. I invested, emotionally and financially, in putting down roots. And so, when slugs arrived in their hundreds to lay claim to my labours, I took it personally. And I took it hard.

In my reaction, arbitrary and extreme though I admit it may seem to those around me (weeping over a parsley plant because the speed of its consumption took it from healthy plant to three bare stalks in just one night, anyone?), there are lessons I need to learn. And, like all lessons that are worth investing in, these do not relate only to this topic, or this fight. Thinking small and modestly, as ever, it seems to me that these are lessons that can be magnified, rippling on and on until they end up, quietly and accidentally, making all the difference in the world.

  1. Let go of how you thought things would be. Before I started anything, I had a vision of where I wanted it to end. There would be a herb garden, full of mint, some strawberries, and a glass of Pimms other herbs I use regularly scattered neatly within their rockery borders. Elsewhere would be flowers that staggered their blooming naturally throughout the year without needing too much support, and maybe, if they couldn’t be killed off with too much rain or not enough tenderness, a few sprouts stalks that I detest and The Paleontologist adores. I started with what I wanted the end result to look like, not what was appropriate for this space, what was possible in this timescale, what would be supported by this ecosystem or this soil or this weather. I tried to cram my surroundings into a mould of my own choosing, and it Did Not Work. Living a simpler life, linked more to our surroundings and the natural flow of the seasons and less to getting exactly what we want the instant we want it, we must aim to be a part of the whole, not expect to impose our will and desires over everything, and feel personally affronted when the slugs fail to read the memo to cease and desist in living off a certain herb patch just because it makes me feel like summer is finally here.
  2. Do your research. Then do it again. When you don’t know very much about a topic, it’s pretty important, it turns out, to do some research before you leap in headfirst. When the slugs first appeared, I realised I needed to know more. I started to investigate. I tried things out. They Did Not Work. (I’m looking at you, eggshells…) I did some more research. I tried some more things. They Did Not Work Either. So I did some more research. I’m trying more things. They haven’t worked yet, but there is still time, and that means there is still hope. Because sometimes, we have a great idea, and a couple of other people think it’s a good idea too, so that confirms that it’s worth trying. And sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean it was wrong to try. It doesn’t mean it won’t work for other people. It just means it didn’t work for us, in this moment, and so we can either accept defeat, or find another plan. Covid-19 has taught us all that when things really matter to us, we have to be able to be flexible. We need to take that lesson and run with it in the years to come; because giving up and accepting catastrophic climate change after the first hurdle or two just isn’t an option.
  3. Ask for help. Honestly speaking, I didn’t start by asking for help. I started more by having a whinge and a cry and hoping that The Vicar would do something magical and just make the slugs disappear. (Did I secretly want him to break all my principles and buy the most industrial-strength slug repellent out there, on Next Day Delivery, leaving me with both a solution and plausible deniability in its execution? Maaaybeee…)* Very few of us have all the answers, and none of us have the constant energy or the consistent willpower or the sheer, unwavering bloody-mindedness to keep going perpetually. So find someone who is good at being up when you’re down, or who gets their second wind when it’s already gone midnight and you have to do the school run tomorrow (hypothetically speaking, of course), or will just help you to think of other ideas that you haven’t yet tried, and help you to work out which of the ideas you have researched are practical, and which might accidentally set off a catastrophic chain reaction that will destroy the space-time continuum, or, at the very least, kill the hedgehogs as well as the slugs.
  4. Enjoy the unexpected successes. Seeing everything as hopeless is the quickest way I know to give up entirely. You won’t be able to change the world in the blink of an eye. You may not even live to see the world changed at all. So celebrate the small successes when they come. Celebrate the planting of an apple seed that actually starts to grow. Celebrate the mint plant that is still standing in the morning when, on slug patrol at 11:30pm, you were convinced all hope was lost. Celebrate the completed eco-bricks and the cycled school-runs and the conversations about how important this is to you that don’t end in arguments. Celebrate the legislation changing people’s hearts and minds one country, one company, one town at a time. And then keep working to do more. Let those successes spur you on, not make you complacent; because if one thing can change, so can many more.

*He didn’t do this. He did do something with salt that I didn’t ask too many questions about, but he didn’t do this.

A selection of the plants in my garden that have not (yet) been consumed by the local wildlife. In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably mention that the trees, as the most successful plants out there, were not planted by me. In fact, the most successful of all is probably more a weed than anything else, despite being as tall as the shed it is right next to…

The countdown to a simpler Christmas. Week 3 (and a bit): More beauty, less of a beast

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My Fabulous Mother was fond of recounting, when I was growing up, her Greatest Success as a counsellor (though, now I think more about both counselling and confidentiality, I suspect this might actually have been her Greatest Success that was Also Appropriate to Share with her Children). This success occurred as follows. At around this time of year, or maybe a little earlier, one very overworked and underappreciated client spent some of her session ranting about sprouts. “I don’t know why I bother! They’re so much hassle, and nobody even likes them!” Mother, looking her directly in the eye with her head tilted just a little to one side (yes, I’ve been the recipient of a few of Those Looks myself) suggested calmly “Well, don’t do them then.” And with those five words, Christmas tradition and a source of major angst were both knocked down like the flimsy Ikea-bought gingerbread house they were.*

A gingerbread box with smarties covering it.
It is a good thing Ikea’s furniture is significantly better than their gingerbread houses. This deserted shack was all that could be salvaged from this year’s purchase. Still tasted good, though…

The Internet has been teeming with similar stories recently, as household after household have their bubbles popped and now face Christmas alone. Suddenly it is OK to look at what you would like to eat, rather than what you’ve always eaten in the past, or what you feel is expected. Pigs in blankets? Eat the whole pack! Nothing but eggnog? Well, at least it’s full of protein! All the trimmings but none of the turkey? Can’t say anyone would blame you! But these traditions, and stresses, and plans are all there for the sake of the people we love most in the world – or at least, are most closely related to. And the people we will be spending it with this year, if we’re not spending it alone, are one fraction of that same group – the people we love most in the world. So if we’re not doing all the franticness and faffiness for ourselves or the people we love most, who are we doing it for?

One clichéd beast is that it is all for the children. We must do everything, be everywhere, take part in every activity and contribute to every appeal because if we don’t, their Christmas will be less than it could have been. For those of you without primary school aged children, let me give a flavour of what I mean here. Even in these Covid-riddled times, with no End of Term disco or Christmas play/activity afternoon/assembly to squeeze in, we still had: a Zoomed introduction to Year 2 SATS; Viking Day (Muuum, I was the only one with a homemade costume! It was the Worst Day Ever!); Wedding Day (to celebrate Christian traditions. Because no other Christian traditions spring to mind at this time of year…); Christmas Party Day; Christmas Jumper & Santa Run Day (don’t forget the donation, just a quick dash into a supermarket as we have no doodle-free colouring books or un-nibbled mince pies in the house, naturally…); Christmas lunch (which had to be reordered separately to all their other school dinners, which was probably handy as it was about the only school dinner I actually managed to order in advance); breakfast with Santa (via Zoom, and only for The Cowgirl. The Paleontologist was furious when she found out, not because she missed a Zoom call with Santa, but because she missed waffles for breakfast); and finally, to top it all off, the flu inoculations, with a likely side effect of fever. Good thing a temperature isn’t something to be worried about, really. Oh, wait…

Christmas for The Children goes beyond school nightmares activities, of course. It seeps into everything, becoming indistinguishable from actions to appease my own Ghost of Christmas Past. These things that made Christmas magical for me, I try to recreate so that my children can also feel that magic. The beauty, the candlelight and singing and tranquility my parents somehow pulled off? Those are the things I would love my kids to look back on and smile at in years to come, as they still have that effect on me. But fighting to recreate a half-remembered and thoroughly idealised holiday that fits neither the temperaments not the needs of this household, in this time, in this place, destroys the beauty of my memories by trying to cram them into a stress-shaped handmade golden star gently spinning in the frantic storm of my passing.

One way to make Christmas a thing of beauty is to make it all for God. The carol services and soaring soprano descants and the infant Jesus being borne to the crib at Midnight Mass are things of beauty, of mystery, of joy and worship and wonder. There is peace on the face of every one of those faithful worshippers, who have struggled more than ever this year, and now laugh in relief as they wish everyone love and joy and go home to sleep for a week. There is beauty in the people who come to church every year, in those who come every week, in those who come every day. There is beauty in the reaffirmation of faith and the deepening of commitments, making church-going just a little bit more normal, just for one day. There is soaring beauty and joy there. And there is such a beast to: the beast of expectations, of seeing the finished result of a service and imagining it was as easy to put together as it was to participate in; of settling in to the familiar and forgetting that even the familiar must be practiced and reworked and takes more effort than dragging a wheelie bin through a hedge backwards, just as those secular reworkings of cooking the dinner and decorating the house and searching, again, for the list of addresses you swore last year you would put back in a safe place takes time, and energy, and emotion. And through it all you have cancelled dreams and last minute positive Covid tests and phone calls from people expecting decisions it is not yet possible to make. For me, some of the greatest beauty in the season is held in the familiar worship, recreated anew every year; and some of the greatest beastliness can be found in what it takes to make that worship possible.

Maybe Christmas is for Good? Anyone with as bad a taste in cheesy heartwarming films as I have will have seen many, many different incarnations of the story (probably) initiated by A Christmas Carol, where someone who thinks only about money discovers the error of his (and it does seem to usually be his) ways, discovers the Magic of Christmas, and opens his heart to joy. In Nativity that joy means accepting the past and embracing self-belief. In A Muppet Christmas Carol it means supporting local businesses and realising that money can be used for good as well as ill. In Love Actually it means acknowledging and embracing those around us who get us through, even though this hurts sometimes. In A Christmas Story it means doing your best to fulfil your children’s dreams, even if they break their hearts (or their glasses) in the process. In Christmas Vacation it means destroying everything around you in order to discover that the things that really matter are not the lights, or the eggnog, or even the Christmas Bonus, but are rather the people you share those horrific, hilarious moments with. And the list could, of course, go on, and on, and on. People with their priorities misplaced get them corrected by the magic in the air and the movements of Father Christmas, and renew all our faith in ourselves, humanity, and the world. These are tales that place goodness at the heart of Christmas, and yet in themselves create impossible expectations and unliveable ideals that contribute, in part, to the reason that this season causes more divorces than any other in the year.

Christmas is about individual traditions and collective memories. It means working to help those who are lost or abandoned by others or the system; it means finding beauty and hope in lights in your neighborhood or the local parks; it means worshipping and glorying in individual acts or communal praise; it means finding the perfect gift that will be used and treasured and remembered for years to come; but it doesn’t mean all of these things, all together, all of the time, for every person. It is not about outdoing others, or overdoing excess, or doing every single thing that makes your memories sing every single year. I hope that this year, for all the darkness many will face in the days ahead; for all the food that will be thrown away in one house while next door starve with no access to fresh supplies; for all the people who tore their families apart working out their original Christmas bubbles and cannot see anyone at all now to fix the deep-running pain; I hope for all the hurt we have faced this year, it may just give us the chance to re-find the beauty and magic of Christmas in a way we haven’t had for decades before this. And, in the very, very long run, I hope that will be one of the real blessings of 2020.

A garland on a staircase which has actually been hoovered! Wrapped around the banisters are Christmas lights; in the corner is a washing basket and a bookcase.
A handmade garland; reusable advent calendar, Christmas lights on the stairs. This is what my home looks like all year round in my dreams.

*I also very happily followed this advice in my own cooking until my Mother-in-law, who is equally marvellous but has a couple of significant blind spots in the area of Green Vegetables, introduced The Paleontologist to sprouts a few years ago. In doing so she accidentally discovered the one, lightly-steamed-with-no-added-flavour or-they-don’t-count, green vegetable she is not only willing, but eager, to eat…

The countdown to a simpler Christmas. Week 2: eating, drinking and being merry

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Food and I have a complicated relationship, as I may have mentioned just once or twice before. That relationship goes even more haywire at this time of year, as it does for so many other people – and so many other relationships, come to that. When so much emphasis is placed on consumption in general, and the consumption of food to distress in particular, how can we change food and drink and merriment to keep the fun and add in a healthy measure of simplicity?

The first Christmas after The Vicar and I were married was bloody awful memorable, to say the least. The Christmas traditions of my household were birthed in grief, distraction and anger. My side of the family were facing our first Christmas after the death of my father. The Vicar’s side were bearing his brother being on active service overseas, at a time that the media delighted in reminding us all of the danger faced in those long-lasting desert conflicts. Parents were facing handing over control of Christmas to their children, still young enough that the most common question either of us faced was whether we’d be “going home for Christmas.” Mix all of this together, season with the pressures of being a clergy household at a rather busy time of year, spice up with a slightly overbearing and very clear on the Right Way To Do Things grandmother, and you had a recipe that was always fairly likely to send us all over the edge.

The thing that kept me focussed, excited, feeling festive in those dark and dreary days, was food. Planning it, preparing it, sharing it. It started with buying the BBC’s Vegetarian Christmas magazine, pouring over its suggestions on the top deck of a steamed-up bus dragging its way past still-unfamiliar buildings to the not-yet-quite-home village we were living and worshipping in. It grew to become my sanctuary. Food preparation became my escape from people when I couldn’t face any more interaction. Everyone but The Vicar was unequivocally and unconditionally banned from entering the kitchen for any reason at all, on pain of having their eardrums blown. I demonstrated, to myself and all others around me, that Of Course I Was Coping, thank you very much – because would someone who wasn’t coping be able to produce a spread like this?

A table full of all kinds of food - some home made, some shop bought,
The tradition of a Christmas Eve buffet in this household developed over some years, and now forms the basis of All Food Eaten for the following week at least.

From those roots grew something beautiful, yet something that controlled me as much as I controlled it. I love cooking. I love sharing the food I have made, nurturing and nourishing and showing the love I can’t express through the hospitality I can. I love the creativity of trying new recipes and the generosity of planning a menu based on the diets and personal preferences of those I am caring for. But underlying that hope and love is still the conviction that if the food isn’t right and the booze isn’t free flowing, our guests will not feel loved, I will not feel in control, and the snowflake-and-robin-filled house of cards will come crashing down around my ears.

I am not alone in showing love, joy, one-upmanship and control in the creation of a perfectly crafted fortnight of food and drink that is available at any point; of snacks and treats to binge on until nobody can move without groaning. Sharing food is a way of sharing the things we cannot say. Back in the days when we were allowed to share more than thermometers and fear, my full time students would produce a communal Christmas buffet on the last day of term. As (almost exclusively) mothers themselves, bringing in food kicked them into autopilot and allowed them to revel in generosity. They would get up at 4am to start preparing a spread that would bring tears to my eyes. Overflowing heaps of white bread and cheese sandwiches met vast vats of curry and rice. Over shared food came shared music and a breaking down of divisions that had grown deeper and harder as the term had progressed. The shared need of both seeking sustenance and seeking to provide for others showed similarities across boundaries and life experiences that could not be seen in the rigidity of classroom exercises and the now-familiar patterns of who would succeed, who would step forward, who would retire behind uncertainty or sullen non-communication.

A buffet in a classroom - lots of homemade food in the foreground, and a smartboard and images of authors on cupboard doors in the background.
Taking pride in sharing food and experiences – the spread put on by my students a couple of years ago, that fed not only everyone in the room, but also everyone in the staffroom with the leftovers…

Eating food we do not need is as much a waste as throwing food away before it can be consumed. But it is also a joy, a way of opening up that is not achieved through sharing space and spoken experiences alone. In a year that we are all cutting back, cutting down, simplifying, questioning, how do we prune away the unwanted and the dead wood without cutting away the heart altogether? For me, the answer is not in the food and the drink, but in the honesty and openness of admitting what they represent. Sharing, hope and joy are all things I want more of, not less; and if that means cooking a little too much and ending up with a tummy that sends me to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, then that is what I will live with. But fear of rejection, lack of control, needing to prove myself and my place in the world? Those are things I need to leave aside; those are things that will not be granted by feeding the five thousand, however hard I try; and they are not things that are worth killing the planet for.

The countdown to a simpler Christmas. Week 1: Advent

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In my mind and in my fantasies, Advent is a time for making memories, dancing from one perfect moment to another with well-fitting coats and knitted scarves and big smiles as we visit Santa, pick greenery, sing carols and romp together in the snow. The house is clean and shiny from top to bottom; all the de-cluttering jobs that have been nagging at me all year are miraculously tidied up into other people’s welcoming arms; and warmth, fairy lights and the smell of cinnamon and homemade sugar-filled treats fill the air. Presents are handmade and meaningful; cards are written with love and actually posted; decorations are natural, zero waste and beautiful; and the air is pregnant with expectation and spiritual growth.

What Advent actually is, in this household at least, is exhaustion. It is cold. It is hectic. It is children with runny noses and adults who rely on their voices for work but are losing them anyway, and an endless, nagging feeling of not being on top of things. It is hyperactivity and the screeching of “Fiiiiive goooooold riiiiiings” from every room. It is The Palaeontologist screaming in frustration because she used up all her energy five weeks ago and hasn’t worked out how to build up more. It is Zoom calls about upcoming SATS and last minute letters about Viking days at school and realising you have no suitable clothes for the end of term celebration because your children have grown two sizes since they last went to a party. It is waiting not for the birth of Jesus but for clarity over government rules and regulations, The Vicar writing and revising what church services will be possible and how, everyone bending their minds around who will feel safe enough to meet together over the Christmas week, and what the consequences of any actions we take might be.

My reality is overload. My ideal is overly saccharine. Neither of them have any connection to simplicity. And Advent is a season whose heart cries out for simplicity. It is a time when we remember waiting. It is a time that was first filled with the praying, and preparation, and solitude, and weariness, and fear, and uncertainty of a pregnancy and birth that would change the world. It is a time of hoping against all expectations that this year it will be different. It is a time that first ended in a dirty, crowded, love-filled overflow to an inn that was more welcoming than it had space to be. How might it be possible, in an era of moments engineered for the perfect social media shot and endless comparisons across the playground, to bring that simplicity into my own Advent rituals?

One way is resisting some of the many and increasing customs of Advent itself. Advent calendars are shared and re-used every year in this household, and contain acts of kindness and, this year, the Christmas story as well as chocolates (because let’s face it, without chocolate would anyone get as far as looking for the lovingly recycled messages to act on every day? Plus, that boost of sugar before getting out of bed in the morning is apparently exactly what they need to drag themselves into their school uniforms in these final, closing days of a term that has lasted at least two decades.) We avoid Christmas Eve boxes (easy enough when Christmas Eve is a work night, and a busy one at that) and buy Christmas Jumpers – an absolute necessity for any primary school child in modern Britain – second hand, and re-gift them after they are outgrown (or try to – currently, I confess, I have a large and growing pile of them I never remember to give away at the right time of year). And I flatly refuse, with everything that is in me, for the sake of my little remaining sanity and well-being, to do Elf on the Shelf.

Notes for an advent calendar, with quotes from the Christmas story and acts of kindness. They are surrounded by chocolate and lying on top of pieces of Christmas wrapping paper.
Acts of kindness written on recycled Christmas wrapping paper. Two chocolates for every action (anything to avoid another squabbling match); one action for every Advent calendar compartment.

These moves are not enough to satisfy my hope of simplicity. Noise and lights and already-decorated Christmas trees still surround me at all times. The underlying fear that presents will not get bought has started to seep into my nightmares. The alternating fears that when my children look back on Advent, they will either remember nothing but chocolate and Christmas films; or that they will remember nothing good at all, make me seek out more to do and more ways, new ways, different ways to fit in with the expectations of those they are surrounded by and Make Memories by doing, spending, acting.

There is no perfect medium in this one. The things that would be my ideal would not be the ideals of my family. The days are long gone, if they ever existed at all, when I could work towards making my own perfect Christmas and simply expect others to enjoy it too. And that is a good thing. Not only because my perfect Christmas was unachievable, but also because, in moving away from my own ideals and accepting that maybe other people’s ideas have equal value, I have also moved away from thinking only about perfection, about service by martyring myself in a quest for everything to look like a Disney set, and started noticing the moments when we get it right, together; even when that means letting The Cowgirl “help” with making the Christmas cake, turning a 15 minute mixing job into an hour-long blow by blow account of every moment of her school day, interspersed with us both swiping tastes of the uncooked cake batter, loaded with brandy-soaked dried fruit, whenever we thought we could get away with it. I still want to try to read more of the Bible and less of escapist novels downloaded because they were free on Kobo. I also want my children to help me to make new family traditions, which are likely to involve a lot more mud, shrieking, and screen time (quite possibly simultaneously), than I would ever volunteer for. I still want quiet times and times of prayer and times when I intensively clean away a year’s worth of dust and grime and make our living space feel more like a home and less like a haunted house, wrapped in spiders webs and clogged with cat fur. And I also want to do one thing, every day, just for fun. Simplicity can be about what we choose not to do, not to buy, not to eat; it is also about living here, and now, and enjoying what is here and now, rather than focussing always on the future. And focussing on the here and now can be as much a part of waiting and preparation as anything else.

Simple figures of a pregnant Mary and a caring Joseph, on a wooden tabletop, with a homemade Christmas decoration in the background.

Telling tales: trust me, I’m a Vicar’s Wife

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Picture the familiar scene: it was early evening, and the phone rang. Except when I say it rang, I really mean it; in fact, it barely stopped ringing. The first call interrupted bedtime, tears and desperation whispered through the crackling conversation. The last came two hours later, screeching with fury and disgust. In the intervening time, in repeated calls never more than ten minutes apart, we had been on a journey of worry, confusion, growing terror, bafflement, suspicion, anger. The Vicar took the abuse, made the tough choices, fielded the follow-up call from the police at a quarter to midnight; essentially, he continued doing his day job until the early hours of the morning – so no change there. And it all happened within our home: the calls came through on our personal number, breaking into our family space; we talked through what we knew and what we didn’t whilst unloading the dishwasher; we worked through the personal and professional implications of the increasingly frantic demands and the demands of our overflowing laundry basket simultaneously. The calls were interrupted by screams from The Paleontologist (I haven’t done my homework! I’ve broken a nail! Why does everyone keep calling at this time of night!) and made me restart a treadmill run 4 times – and my motivation is really not up to keeping going after that many false starts. And at the end of it all? Nothing. Was it all a scam, or a woman desperate for protection? What would happen now? Did we act to protect ourselves, our family, and others, or did God come knocking in the guise of a stranger and we slammed the door in his face?

This not knowing the end of the story is something they don’t prepare you for when you are promising For Worse as well as For Better to someone wearing a clerical collar. It’s part of Quite a List. They don’t tell you that you will look like a student every week, buying Pot Noodles and microwave rice to give away on your own doorstop. They don’t tell you that others will consider your home as much theirs as it is yours; and that you will do the same, feeling mortified as every Midnight Blue acrylic stain on the beige carpet and scribble along the bedroom ceiling reduces the worth of the property gifted into your care by an institution already in financial crisis. They don’t tell you that some faces and stories and voices will stay with you forever, and others will blur into a featureless amalgam, and you’ll never know which is worse. They don’t tell you that you will feel forsaken by a church, and even a God, who own your husband and your home and give nothing but pain and uncertainty in return. They don’t tell you how hard it will be to walk out of a domestic argument and into your husband’s workplace and keep smiling because, whether you’ve chosen it or not, it’s now your workplace too.

They don’t tell you about Life in Limbo either. Where do I stand, and what is my place? I am not part of the Clergy Club, but neither am I fully part of the congregation. I am held accountable for the actions of the vicar, assumed to know by osmosis all his comings and goings (if only they knew. It takes me a bottle of wine and a clear evening just to sort out which of us has evening meetings when, and to make sure we’re not about to make The Cowgirl responsible for sorting out food for both herself and her far-less-grounded older sister). I bleed for the mistakes but have no place in the successes. My stomach crushes where my heart should be with every live-stream stutter, every microphone failure, every low attendance or argument at the church doors; and yet, I have no place in rectifying these things, no outlet for my anxiousness.

They don’t tell you about the double takes when you kiss a man in a cassock and clerical collar, or the abuse shouted at him on the street because of how he is dressed. They don’t tell you how often you will be told the same joke about having more tea, and how often you will try not to look jaded as you respond that you’ve always preferred gin, thank you. They won’t tell you about the comments that at least you’ve got God on your side (without ever asking about your own faith) or mention the all too familiar look of terror once you are outed to new acquaintances, and they run through everything they have said since you entered the room, muttering “Oh God, did I swear?”, too flummoxed to notice the irony.

“Shall I put the kettle on?” Still from Keeping Mum; the film that explains in great detail why every Vicar’s Wife needs access to a pond.

They don’t tell you that if your spouse gets a promotion you move home, move your own career, move doctors surgeries and swimming lessons and schools and hairdressers and supermarkets you can navigate with both eyes on your children and only 5 minutes to grab what you need. And they don’t tell you that when you arrive, you will be greeted by hampers and flowers and the welcome of a whole new family. They don’t tell you your children will gain a whole congregation-worth of doting uncles and grandmothers who drop everything to sew dinosaur facemasks at a moment’s notice, or break Lockdown to bring you Easter chocolate, who show you the trick of opening a door whilst pushing a pram through the snow, who put pictures of your children on the same wall as those of their own grandchildren, smiling in sunshine from half a world away. They don’t tell you that you will be guests of honour at the opening of new Chinese restaurants; meet authors and pop stars and all the local gentry; be invited to weddings and funerals and enough parties to scupper any hopes of keeping a simple wardrobe; be given wine that sells at 3-digit prices and bottles of Lambrini with equal joy and equal sacrifice. They don’t tell you that you will be welcomed into the homes of new mothers and old widowers, shown hearts and souls and senses of humour that crush stereotypes and fill the world with hope. They don’t tell you how many people will come into your heart and how many of them you will have to say goodbye to, and just how much you will miss them when you’re gone.

They don’t tell you any of this because, of course, there is no they. There is no Vicar’s Wife Academy, especially if, like me, you married someone already trained and ordained. There is nothing but an amazing, unspoken fellowship of men and women sharing tales and tears and knowing laughter, up and down the country and all around the world, as we do our best to be ourselves in what has turned out to be a life more baffling, and beautiful, and exhausting than I had ever anticipated. God has put an astonishing array of opportunities and challenges at my feet. Sometimes I have stepped up to them. Sometimes I have stumbled. Sometimes I have avoided them altogether and pretended that doing so was perfectly reasonable, the obvious thing to do. And always, I pray I can do justice to the power and the hope and the jaw-dropping joy that is the always-unexpected daily grind of life as a Vicar’s Wife.

Flowers that still make me smile years after they welcomed us into this parish.

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.

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.

Reader, I Married Him: Living with Christian Unity

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20 “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 

John 17:20-21 (NRSV)

Fifteen years ago, my mother had a premonition that I would meet my future significant other at one of two religious events that summer: the World Gathering of Young Friends, a week-long gathering of young Quakers from around the globe; or an ecumenical conference at Iona Abbey entitled “Breaking Down Dividing Walls in the 21st Century”, which brought together young people from throughout the UK, from different Christian denominations, to talk about our differences and learn from one another in community.

At the same time, in a far away county, another mother had a very similar premonition: that her son would meet his future significant other at one of two religious events that summer: attending the Catholic World Youth Day as a very interested Anglican observer; or attending an ecumenical conference at Iona Abbey entitled “Breaking Down Dividing Walls in the 21st Century”.

As will be of no surprise to anyone who knows either of our mothers, it turns out they were both entirely right, and my future husband and I did indeed meet on that beautiful, far-flung Scottish island, and have been talking about our differences and learning from one another in community ever since. I had never been to Mass. He thought he knew all about silence as worship already. I stood firm in the interpretation of Quaker communities as a priesthood of all believers, and saw Catholics as bringing goddess-worship back into the Christian fold. He believed in the literal and perpetual virginity of Mary, and not in the ordination of women. It was, shall we say, a bumpy ride to learn to listen to one another with love, with respect, with acceptance without agreement. Now, in this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, I am trying to put into words some of what this process has taught me, some of what I would rather ignore, and some of what I can’t avoid, despite my firmest intentions, because every time I try, it beats me over the head and refuses to give up instead.

Unity takes practise. The order of our social engagements in that rosy, hazy summer struck me much, much later. Both of us arrived in Scotland fueled with the enthusiasm of months of talking about and experiencing our own faith with others – those with similar ways of practising that faith, and those with very different ways of doing it, who still broadly came under the same banner. We had spent time exploring what was significant to us and explaining it to others, across language barriers, cultural expectations, and experiential divides. Our tongues were already in the habit of finding new ways and new words for old and comfortable traditions. Not such a leap, then, to move on to rockier, scarier terrain with those who did not already share that mutual language and tradition.

Conviction without condemnation. In a world of post-truth, and convictions that are made or broken on the back of one throw-away tweet, it is a constant struggle to hold to your own convictions, speak them and share them with others, without inviting or offering condemnation. To be able to say “I think this, and you think that. We utterly disagree, and that’s OK.” To be able to learn from each other, to share cultural understanding and religious heritage, to be able to learn more about your own faith when exploring it through the eyes of others, seeing it for the first time: this is a gift, and a route into deeper understanding. Be warned when taking this route, though. There will be stumbles, false starts, and dead ends way up in the mountains that you find only after days of climbing. You will at times be surrounded by rocks and razor-sharp drops. You will bruise your wrists from swinging, alone and surprised when you thought someone else was securing your rope. You will hurt each other. Sometimes you will hate each other. And all of that is part of a journey to a summit that really is worth every year and belly-deep gasp for breath it took to get there.

Find your balance. Everything needs balance, structure, stability: from see-saws to ecosystems to marriages, they only work if they have both solid foundations and equal amounts of give and take. In my household, it’s all about balance. We have two cats: one is named Fry, as in Elizabeth, a prison reformer strong enough to be put onto a £5 note, and a Quaker; the other named Ambrose, after an equally impressive Saint, who had a habit of speaking truth to power, as well as being patron saint of domestic animals. We go to church one week, Quaker Meeting the next. We go away on church Pilgrimages and on Quaker residential events. The Paleontologist joins the choir; I join Area Meeting trustees. It’s all about balance. And also, maybe, just a bit about general absurdity and the triumph of hope over experience.

Be patient. Be very, very patient. Sometimes things will be very important to another denomination, and no matter how hard you try, it will be nothing more than minutiae to you. Exhibit A: arguing over how improper it is to put Jesus in the crib before Midnight Mass. Exhibit B: a stand-up row involving such jargon as Sufferings, Right Ordering, QPSW and AMs. (I feel like someone should put together a Venn diagram showing who may understand the significance of both those sentences. There’s a part of me that is very afraid the overlap may be rather lonely, though.) Whether you understand it or not; whether you agree with it or it makes your teeth scream on end; you need to dig deep, keep your cool, and, if you’re anything like us, leave the other one to it and go sort out some washing up.

Fifteen years has not been enough to work out how to do all this without hurting each other sometimes. A lifetime may not be enough. Life could have been easier for me if I’d met a nice young Quaker from a similar tradition; or for him if he’d married someone more naturally prepared for the role of Vicar’s Wife. I could have continued unswerving on a path I trod and loved when walking alone. He could have shared his vocation with someone who knows how to behave around bishops and doesn’t leave out some sections of the Creed. It could quite possibly have been easier. But it would have been infinitely less fun. Less like a blindfold rollercoaster with the car attached backwards by mistake. And in the end, it would have left me less aware of myself, and my faith more faltering, more superficial, and far less full of convincement.

A view of Iona Abbey and St Cuthbert's cross, looking out over the sea
Iona Abbey: home of prayer, spirituality and, as it turns out, match-making

Simple creativity: Making something is one way to say I Love You

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You know that feeling of standing in the kitchen after a long day of achieving not very much, trying to avoid looking at the washing up piled forlornly by the sink, vaguely ignoring the nextdoor grunting of sofa gymnastics to the soundtrack of a slightly familiar theme tune, when suddenly, out of nowhere, you hear the line from a made-for-Netflix programme that puts a whole new slant on your thinking? For me, tonight, the programme was Daniel Tiger’s Neighbourhood. I had been mulling over creativity, why I love it, and why I give it so little time, when suddenly and repetitively came an inanely animated voice singing “making something is one way to say I Love You.”

Of course it is! My father was a past master at this one. Once he put together a whole new wall for my bedroom to avoid saying he missed me when I was away for a week. He passed the skill on to me: most noticeably around birthdays, because if you don’t make someone the perfect birthday cake (thank you Pinterest), how will they know you love them? My crafting projects around the house suddenly blur into focus as acts of love towards the family I want to enjoy them; so much easier than thinking about needing to keep up appearances or avoid judgement from passersby. Though let’s face it, saying I love you isn’t the only reason to be creative…

What could possibly say I Love You more than a cake topped with dinosaur bones and biscuity mud?

Then there’s making things for Christmas – food, beds, decorations, to do lists, an unholy mess, and everything else needed for good old-fashioned relaxing fun. Let me make one thing clear: this is absolutely not me saying it’s time to think about Christmas. Not until Advent; don’t even get me started. Why would the council put up Christmas decorations on Remembrance Day? How can people be sorted except for “a few last minute things” by the end of October? And the people who manage to have jobs, small children, and send out Christmas cards all at the same time… No, this is about me thinking about why it is so important to me to make things myself when my eyelids are trying to close themselves over burning balls of fire at four o’clock in the afternoon, and why I keep cards, and ribbons, and paper from one year to the next, to the next, to the next, in the hope that maybe this year will be the year they get transformed into gift tags, origami stars, or anything from my recently borrowed copy of Paper Christmas. (Borrowed from the Library at the same time as Stuff That Sucks. Is my subconscious overdoing it, do we think?)

Why do I put us all through this every year? Because how else can I say I love you to my man, who works into the night so often through December (Midnight Mass is an early finish in comparison), holding and supporting and grounding everyone else’s festive spirits and crashing out on the sofa by 6pm on Christmas Day (and if we ate lunch at lunchtime that day he’d never make it that late). How else could I say it to my children, who struggle through a season of snuffles and broken routine and hype and impossible dreams, and all they have between them and devastation is whatever we manage to spin from our imagination and overnight Amazon deliveries? How could I say it to my extended family, who have fussed and fretted their way through Advent, watching the weather forecast and praying it won’t snow yet, that the roads will be clear, that there will be room in the car and the house and their brains for everything that needs to be remembered?

It turns out I quite like carving pumpkins. It also turns out I’m not very good at letting the children take a turn, in case they Get It Wrong…

Saying I love you is important. It is important to children who need security; to spouses who need appreciation; to friends who never get as much time as they deserve; to people we have known forever and people we’ve only just met. It’s also important to ourselves. Writing; baking; crafting; planting flowers: they are all ways for me to say to myself that I am worth the time I am spending on me, OK being proud of the results of my labours, that enjoyment for its own sake is allowed to be an act of love. Creativity in a world of numbers and statistics and targets has been weighed, and measured, and found wanting. It will not solve the climate catastrophe. It will not save humanity from itself. Being silly and spontaneous and simple does not often make it onto the news, or even our highly edited Newsfeeds. But for me, at least, it brings peace. Balance. Acceptance. And making things is one way to say I Love Me.