On Good Friday we went to St Paul’s Cathedral for Matins. It’s a formal choral service, dominated by sung psalms, anthems and responses, creating a context for the congregation to dwell in the music, the mood, the building. For me, it creates a restorative and peaceful space: I breathe a little more slowly, more deeply, most restfully.
I often feel better after going to church, but I don’t go very often. Continue reading
My brother makes sloe gin and, at Christmas, he presented us with a bottle, along with home-made jam and preserves. We’d made an enthusiastic start on it, but for some reason the last few measures lingered in the bottle, until I decided to finish it more as an act of tidying up . I’d forgotten how delicious it is.
There is a particular grace about home-made, consumable gifts: in our cluttered lives, they don’t demand permanent accommodation, they aren’t meant to last. And they offer such a tangible link to the donor. It pleases me to think of my brother making sloe gin.
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Development in Rose II by Anni Albers
I had a half-written blog and was resisting its completion because I felt that I’d written enough about mourning and mortality. Then, this week, I learned that my first boyfriend had died, just days short of his 56th birthday, and next heard of the more public loss of Jeremy Hardy. Poignantly, the topic recurs and is ever-present. So I returned to my themes.
In as much as one anticipates mourning, I think one foresees it as a fixed-term contract: stages to move through, to process, and then it’s completed. The experience is, of course, less clear,
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A few days ago it was announced that John Burningham has died. He wrote and illustrated children’s books and was the illustrator of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, the book by Ian Fleming which became even more famous in a musical film version. As is often the case when a figure who featured in my own childhood dies, my emotions were mixed: Continue reading
Last week I met up with my English teacher. We have seen each other occasionally over the years, perhaps once a decade since she taught me at ‘A’ level many years ago. And it occurred to me that there are few people in my life now who knew me at 17. My close friendships date from university and later; my brother is the only member of my family who knew me as a child and is still living. Continue reading
The other day I received last-minute tickets for a BBC recording at the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House. I had no other plans so decided to go, despite the short notice. I also realised that what appealed to me was multi-layered: not just the show itself (Newsjack), but the more general enjoyment of watching a live recording; not just the event, but the fact that the ticketing/admission process involves waiting beforehand for about an hour.
And there I checked myself slightly.
The waiting around for an hour beforehand?
Like many of their generation, my parents grew up in rented homes and were first-time property owners. My grandfather viewed my father’s ambition to buy his own house with suspicion. They were savers, not spenders, and debt, in the form of a mortgage, was a grave concern. For my father, however, property owning meant security and independence.
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My water bill contains the suggestion that I have a meter installed so that I can pay for the water I use. This, is states, is “fairer”.
I am reminded of a scene in Anne Fine’s novel “Taking the Devil’s Advice” in which children are squabbling over how to share a cake and their father suggests using age as the criterion. This seems reasonable to the children and to be based upon something quantifiable and objective, so they consent – whereupon, with three adults in the room, the young children end up with tiny slivers. And in tears. “Fairness” is a not a simple concept. It may be easy to define in the abstract but it is fiendishly difficult to employ. Different matrices produce very different results. Continue reading
The jacket reminded her of Nelson and, in some strange way, made her feel braver.
The Crossing Places, Elly Griffiths
It’s January and the sense of a new start, together with tantalising offers of sales from the shops, tempts many of us to review our wardrobes. I struggle with buying clothes: faced with what seems like endless rails of garments, I find it hard to discriminate; trying items on is an ordeal wherein I often feel the problem lies with the figure underneath, not the clothing. I have to be in a particularly positive frame of mind (immediately after a haircut is a good time), dart into the shops, look briskly and purposefully while the mental energy persists and then make a quick exit as soon as my mood starts to decline. Shopping trips are often brief skirmishes in an ongoing, inexplicable war. The small campaign victories can, however, be very precious: those garments which ‘work’ and become loved. They are reached for from the wardrobe as trusted old friends and their wearing never fails to lift the spirits.
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The most exciting television this weekend was not Line of Duty, but a moment in Doctor Who. An episode called Thin Ice, set in 1814 London at the time of the Thames Ice Fair, and the moment comes as the Doctor confrons Lord Sutcliffe, who has developed an unorthodox bio fuel supply chain – including a captive alien – to ensure that his mills are powered and his business prospers:
Sutcliffe: I made the most of the situation.
Doctor: What makes you so sure that your life is worth more than those people out on the ice? Is it the money? Is it the accident of birth that puts you inside the big fancy house?”
Sutcliffe: I help move this country forward; I more this empire forward
Doctor: Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you put on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege. The boy who died on the river, that boy’s value is your value.
lesleyjonesberry 