sunny day

Lent continues apace. The fasting is boring and trying and hard. The house sale is still not secure, the agent is on holiday. But, though it is still freezing cold, we have SUNSHINE. What a shock. Maybe Spring is starting at long last. The light is longer. Praying for a breakthrough with the house. I bought the packing boxes 'in faith' and the next day it all nearly fell through. I feel so right about it though, that I am sure it will come right in God's time, with patience. But it doesn't stop the yearning. I'm going to leave off and go and meet my friend Halaas. She is at a difficult time in her life.
But I am feeling positive and hopeful, even though I hate waiting. Perhaps it is the sun . I'm going to write more this week.

The Social Worker's Scarf

I thought I'd had the unexpected pleasure of being chatted up today. Before I stank to high heaven of dry-fried herring. On reflection, he could just have been genuinely impressed by my scarf. He was very attractive, with a cool hat and a cool baby and a soft American accent. This is what made me mistake his interest in my non-descript, hand-woven scarf for flirtation, he couldn't actually love my scarf could he? I mean, its a nice scarf. I bought it in an emergency when we had 2 cm of snow this year and I wasn't equipped for it. It does the job. Its just a bit 'Social Worker'. A bit 'Sensible Shoes'. A bit 'Earnest and Worthy'. I was a bit taken aback that someone so hip would be so impressed with it. Perhaps he thought I was Miss Marple, or thinks that this is how we are in England, always commenting on one another's scarves. "My, what a nice scarf Ms Jones!", "Why thank you Mr Smith". But it wasn't the Home Counties circa 1930, nobody was wearing carnations in their lapels. So, I assumed I was being chatted up, by a sexy bloke with a cute baby. So I can't really account for what happened next.

"Oh, thanks" I said, "I call it my Social Worker Scarf". I think I said it wittily. Its not that I have anything against Social workers. He clearly didn't get the humour and laughed a bit unconvincingly and asked "why?", I thought this gave him away. "Well, you'd have to see it with the beads". He started on about "what does a Social Worker's scarf look like?", and the whole joke began to fall apart. I was blinking anyway because I have been persevering with Dostoevsky's The Idiot at night under an eco-bulb. I had wanted to mention the baby, which seemed only polite. I had intended to tell him "what a beautiful baby Mr American!" but it would have been a lie, because I couldn't actually see it. I had thought I was going blind, but Graham says it's because the print is so small. It is too, I had wondered why it had taken me so long to read it. Apart from the fact that I loathe it. The only thing I do enjoy is the humour, and I can admit the genius of his characterisation. I think, for all my misgivings about Dostoevsky, he would have understood about my Social Worker Scarf. He might also have understood about the awkward exchange at the coffee counter with the softly spoken American.

I've not heard that Dostoevsky was much of a looker. Its hard to tell with all that facial hair. The man who pretended to love my Social Worker Scarf had a bit of that too, but he didn't get the joke, even when I described the beads. This is why a good-looking man, with or without facial hair, however good-looking and however cool his hat, and however cool his baby isn't always enough. Its the humour that matters. My husband gets it.

Oily fish

It has been several months since my last, and final, unfortunate encounter with a mackrel. I felt it was time to give the humble Herring a chance. All the whole food experts and nutritionists and all the good people out there eager for healthy brains, guts, hearts and so on recommend the very thing that strikes fear into my heart and a projectile vomit message to my stomach.

Oily fish.

Those of you who have read my previous post will be familiar with the wildly enthusiastic Patrick Holford. He is the big time believer in the power of food to transform our lives. He is the man who swears that an oily fish several times a week keeps the Doctor at bay. Knowing Patrick he would eat it with it's head still on, eyes blinking, such is his passion for fresh produce. I chickened out and almost cried with relief when the fishmonger offered to take off it's head and insides. The Mackrel had come complete with it's innards and I had forgotten to take them out during the last fateful liaison with an oily fish. I was embarrassingly grateful to see The Herring headless and gutless.

I had thought that with the head and eyes missing and the fish offal scraped out I was on to a better start. No. Not so. Patrick didn't help me, because he forbids sea salt and additional oil. The only mention of the word 'butter' is somewhere on the graph of 'foods that KILL' under 'dairy fats'. Perhaps he is concerned that if he types the word 'butter', even under the chapter on Heart Disease, he might remember that comforting smell of sizzling golden butter warming on the stove. God alone knows what would become of him if he remembered the taste of a hot, salted chip or the texture of a newly baked loaf of white bread. Yes...you guessed it...white bread is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! Even on its own, its wrong. You can forget all about the fresh zing of home-made marmalade....because of the sugar...WRONG!

I love to get sanctimonious about what I percieve as my Puritan eathing habits to my heathen husband. A man so addicted to freshly ground coffee, Yorkie Bars and sausage rolls that I often remind him of his mortality and threaten to avoid his funeral when (not 'if') he dies before he reaches 45. The man is moderate really, but I do enjoy whining about his buttered crumpets, sighing about his occasional bowls of vanilla ice cream, tutting about the emptied biscuit tin, and we all know why, don't we? Yes, its because I'm jealous. I'm jealous of every single mouthful, and I'm jealous that he doesn't care a stuff, and I would love to be so unconcerned with my health, my body, my spare tyre.

I tried today, I'm sorry Patrick but I really tried. I managed the tasteless splodge of saltless, sugarless oats this morning by going wild and adding some walnuts. They didn't help much, and by 11 am I was reaching for the pumpkin seeds all over again.

health food phase

It would be hard to describe Patrick Holford's NEW Optimum Nutrition Bible to anyone unfamiliar with a pumpkin seed. It is even harder to imagine of what Patrick Holford's OLD Optimum Nutrition Bible might have consisted. I suspect the NEW one is even less 'fun with Patrick' than the OLD one and this is a reliable assumption because it would be hard to imagine anything less enticing than this NEW ecyclopaedia of joyless eating. The fact is that Patrick's presence in our home marks a return to the 'Health Food Phase' I went through in my teenage, vegetarian years. This was a phase much embraced and ecouraged by our mother who was ahead of her time in her eco-friendly, recycling egg-shells, organic home grown honey ways. We were raised by a woman so devoted to the medicinal benefits of honey that she even proposed it to my sister as a cure for breast cancer. It didn't go down well.

I am not sure how long my relationship with Patrick is going to last. I have developed an alarming passion for pumpkin seeds, so it looks promising. I am a woman who likes to plan ahead. I have started worrying about my bowels and osteoporosis, and so I now force a bowl of my least favourite food down my neck every morning. Until I met Patrick I was starting to come to terms with my unwelcome companion over the breakfast news, oiling the waters my bowl of oats with double cream, maple syrup and almonds. My mother, of course had her porridge made with water and salt. She probably had honey as well. But Patrick says, no honey, no maple syrup and no double cream. I'm allowed almonds, but only twelve of them in the afternoon with a piece of fruit. So my explorations of the possiblities of porridge have been reduced to a mean teaspoon of flaked almonds. Perhaps this is why pumpkin seeds have become so alluring.

Patrick Holford's NEW Optimum Nutrition Bible found it's way into our home shortly after a chance encounter with a licqorice and peppermint teabag and a bout of Swine Flu. Not the most orthodox of romantic encounters, certainly not 'dinner a deux' over a bottle of Bordeaux. Luckily for you as a lifelong amnesiac I have forgotten the details but suffice to say that the teabag and the bout of Swine Flu between them somehow weaned me off caffeine and I never looked back. I developed an insatiable appetite for liqcorice tea, though I never have worked out how to spell it, as you can see. As a consequence I had to trawl Health Food Shops to fuel my craving. As a further consequence I suddenly had to beg the unhealthy looking owner if I could use her toilet. She looked alarmed, I suppose she may have been concerned that I was too toxic, but she was, of course, ethical and allowed me to use it, eco-friendly recycled loo roll and all.

All this was a recipe for an slightly unexpected conversation about this bizarre craving for this tea which I had discovered by mistake. "Oh" says the unhealthy-looking Health Food Shop owner, "that is because it is particularly good for chest infections". I obviously looked dumbfounded. She went on "If you have been suffering with Swine Flu and chest problems then your body is telling you what you need". I was polite, but I knew the packet said something like 'aids digestion'. Either way, she didn't have any for sale. Which you or I, whether familiar with the pumpkin seed community or not, would have thought unremarkable in itself. "Well", says I, "who would? its a bit odd after all!". "No, no, if you had come in yesterday I could have sold you loads, but we had a lady who came and bought our entire stock of Licqorice tea, so we've run out, if I'd known...". Well, how could she have 'known' she would have a sudden rush on Licorice tea?

The nut addiction followed shortly after this strange development in my personal habits. I went back to my thin pale friend in her wrapped up in scarf, hat and gloves in her lightless, ethically heated and therefore freezing cold shop. I asked her about our bodies and why they suddenly start asking for things. She started to look alarmed again, like the last time when I demanded to use her low-level flush wc with its water-saving device. I wanted to explain that I meant nutritionally speaking, not the satisfaction of carnal instincts. She fully understood this because I came out carrying a copy of Patrick Holford's overambitious claims. Patrick displays absolutely no signs of carnal instincts. Even his sex life is rationed according to how much it depletes his levels of zinc.

A lady came in for a couple of crates of cider vinegar, another of our Mother's eccentric tastes. A friend had read somewhere that drinking cider vinegar helped to curb our appetites. A friend had, she said, lost a stone just by drinking cider vinegar. Patrick would have been appalled because our kindly earnest Health Food seller advised her to swill it down with a couple of spoonfuls of honey. To my horror I joined in the conversation. "My mother swore by it and she lived to be 79 and she wasn't fat" I said, which was disingenuous because she did also die of a hideous cancer, which even honey couldn't cure and she kept her weight off by scuttling around after my father.

I can't deny feeling a bit cynical. In the section about living a long life, he advises 'avoiding heavy traffic' and I can't help feeling I'd rather die young than count out my almonds in an Old People's home. We shall persevere, perhaps me and Patrick can work out a compromise, where I don't die of boredom and lose all my friends to an over-zealous nutritionist.

a word of advice

My advice for the New Year would be: don't do a New Year post entitled A Poem for my Funeral,
it makes people feel a bit nervous.
Anyway, enough of that, on to matters in this life.

We recieved an offer on our house, which was from the first people to view it. They came for a viewing in the morning. Then, overwhelmed no doubt by my neat cushions and carefully placed magazines designed to offer auto-suggestions a la Derren Brown, that master of psychological manipulation, they rushed back for a second viewing in the afternoon. This prompted more fire-lighting, candle-lighting, dimmed lights for mood, and various other tricks for atmosphere which, being intelligent adults they doubtless saw through in the blink of an eye. They then made an offer on the first working day after that. So, they are either keen, or they thought we looked a bit stupid because the offer was a lousy 30 grand under the asking price. For reasons no one can explain to me we have had to play this absurd game of cat and mouse. It is all very strange. No one expects to get the asking price for a house and no one expects to pay it either and so we all put our houses on the market at a price we know no one will pay and do our sums according to an offer below the price we are asking or being asked to pay. If you pay the asking price for a house everyone thinks you are a mug, so no one ever likes to lose face and no one ever offers the asking price, unless they are a mug of course. It seems to me that it would be a great deal less hassle if we all asked for a price we expected to sell at. We're not Turkish, we're English, we don't haggle. The only way we can justify such a lack of manners is to make up spurious nonsense about inadequately supported chimney breasts, damp cellars and unkempt hedges, which makes our mean offer seem 'fair'. As it is everyone spends many confused hours by their phones waiting to hear that the offer they offered below the asking price won't be accepted and the price they asked for won't be offered, etcetera, etcetera. It is all very distressing and boring and predictable. The game is that everybody tries to fleece everybody else and nobody wins. I'm writing this waiting for the phone to ring to say that the buyers can't offer what we are asking, in which case, I would like to ask 'why did they come and visit the house in the first place?'. If they had thought to themselves 'we are first time buyers and we can't afford this house', they wouldn't have visited in the first place and I would not have had to make a point of lighting every scented candle I have in the house. I would have been spared spending an entire week hiding all signs of life, placing unused bars of soap where usually there would be a worn out lump with unsightly hairs all over it. Placing perfectly folded clean towels on the towel rail. Two decisions which may have cost me dear because in the event they turned out to be post-graduates from Durham and Birmingham and will have possessed acute powers of deduction. Who knows, they may have deduced, if their imaginations are as over-active as mine, that we never washed. Either way, had they decided that we had a little self-respect and were not going to give our property away in exchange for an M & S gift voucher I would have been spared hours of polishing the taps, taking down all photographs of us (the occupiers!), hiding assorted underwear, light bulbs and tile adhesive under the bed in the spare room. Graham would have been allowed to use the loo and wouldn't have been coerced into hiding his bed-side table coin stash. In short, my week's work would not have consisted of making the enitre house look uninhabited and scented like the first floor of a department store. Even that backfired when they all started sneezing simultaneously in the bathroom with its 'tea time in Marrakesh' candle.

Now I wait to hear the bad, but ultimately inevitable news that they can't afford our house which I used every psychological trick in the 'how to manipulate potential buyers' manual to try and sell to them. I can't leave the landline phone because my poor mobile has been boiled in a cup of tea for reasons I can't be bothered to explain.

It is all a bit frustrating, but don't worry, you won't be needing that funeral poem just yet.

A poem for my funeral

When I die I don't want to be remembered for the things I didn't do
I won't be spoken of as the person who never did and never was
I refuse to be the woman who wasn't this and wasn't that
Don't speak of the 'couldn't have' and the 'wasn't able'
At my funeral do not define me by who I did not become but celebrate who I was
Don't mourn what I couldn't be, cheer because I could only be this
The tragedies and the losses of my life will never define me and I have not worn them as a badge
When you bury my bones talk about that
Sing about the gifts I had and the things I did
Be grateful for the laughter, but also for the healing tears
Cry over the empty space I filled
But don't cry because it is now empty
Cry because you will miss the way I filled it
Talk about the colours I wore and the songs I sang, chat about the way I moved through this life
Remember that this was the life I was given and this was the life that I lived and the landscape I lived in
Remember too that I loved and lived because I was loved until I learned how to live
Give thanks that you loved me back to life.

The feasts we prepared
The food that we shared
The words that we used
The laughter that moved us

The aching inside
and
The sheer gigglitus
The tears that we shed
and
The wordless emotion

The views that we saw
The countries visited
The songs we have sung
and the languages spoken

The dances danced
pictures painted
poetry cited
These were Love requited

The man in the seat in front.

"Are you, er, feeling a bit, well, are you, er in a better place, a bit, further on, a bit more, well, are you a bit more relaxed after your break?" said the man in the seat in front. Mo thought 'that's English code for 'I heard through the grapevine that you had a nervous breakdown before the Christmas break and wondered whether you were out of hospital yet and whether the medication was working.' Sometimes she loved the English, because sometimes creeping stealthily around a 'difficult' topic with euphemisms and diffident stuttering was a kinder way. The deep voice continued to resound around the railway carriage as the train moved predictably through its frozen landscape to Birmingham City Centre. It was refreshing to hear a rich toned cosmopolitan voice. "Er, yeah, um, I think we need to get all our ducks lined up in a row" he said, and Mo imagined six little plastic yellow ducks sitting on the edge of a misplaced and rusty enamel bath nestled in a snowy wasteland in Siberia being blown to pieces with a rifle. Not for the first time she wished that she could control her thoughts sometimes. "Er, yeah, sure, well, we'll ease in gently and have a conference call on Thursday" he said smoothly, and, Mo thought, kindly. It was the first working day after the New Year. That first Monday back, when the photocopier refuses to work and the heating breaks down and the trains protest about the weather and everyone goes down with colds and the Christmas decorations suddenly look tired and ridiculous. The man in the seat in front had sorted out his business meeting with his depressed friend. The train was pulling in to the hideous concrete station, with its strange textured grey block walls, the snow skipping on the wind. On the platform there were a handful of huddled shapeless black coats hanging from a small batch of people who hadn't dressed for the cold, waiting to catch the train. Everyone was wearing black, it was as though the entire country were in mourning. She followed the Man From The Seat In Front off the train, wondering how she could have imagined his face, his shape, his outline and hair so wrongly. He wasn't suave or well-dressed or even handsome. It was very disappointing. He wasn't ugly or badly dressed either. He was a bit mediocre, he didn't deserve this rich, self-confident baritone voice for a ring tone. He should have sounded dull. He should have had a flat, dimensionless voice. Why did such anomolies occur in life? It made no sense at all for God to give this unpreposessing man such a sublime sound. Mo was the kind of woman who often bemoaned the lack of sense in the world. She wasn't a grumling sort. She was just bemused by the odd things, like this bland man with his delicious tones. It was just another example of nothing making any kind of sense.

to be continued...

2010

First day of a new year
I love new year
it is a starting again time
A new decade is even more exciting.
This is my prayer for the New Year and the New Decade

Flame-dancing Spirit, come,
Sweep us off our feet and
Dance us through our days.
Surprise us with your rythms,
Dare us to try new steps, explore
New patterns and new partnerships.
Release us from old routines,
To swing in abandoned joy
And fearful adventure.
And in the intervals,
Rest us
In your still centre."

Ann Lewin

Thank God for Ashan

Ahsan Nadeem Sheikh and I used to dance at a ballet class together, for a few weeks one random year while he was here from a country I had never visited and a culture I would probably never understand. Sometimes Ashan writes to me and now he is living far away from the West Midlands and I know much more about him now than I did stumbling through my clumsy ballet routines trying to be graceful then. We never met for coffee as far as I remember or went for a walk and I know so little about his life that I was deeply moved to realise that this man (who I only know as a petite performance dancer from a faraway land where no one does ballet) remembered me and I remembered him just from dancing in a class together in the silent way that dance unites people.

Today he reached out in a strange instinct across the world and made me write again on a very specific day in my life and I wonder how on earth we forget what amazing creatures human beings are. How is it that we know to reach out to people at such significant moments? I had written an article that had touched him called 'unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar places', and because it had moved him he wrote to me to let me know that it had moved him. This is the kind of thing that Ashan would do. This is one thing of a handful of things I know about Ahsan, that he is the kind of man thoughtful enough to make sure that someone knows when they have touched his life. People like this invariably touch our hearts in return because they make us realise our own gifts and values.

I found his message just now while still thinking about a conversation I had today. I had chatted with one of my most favourite people about us both being paralysed by fear over our desire to write and be published. I came home wondering why I had stopped blogging and lost my confidence. When this message reached me via the miracle that is Facebook from this kind man I hardly know I genuinely thought he had got the wrong person because I had forgotten that I had ever written a piece called 'unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar places' and went on my blog to check.

Thanks to Ashan I read it again and it moved me too at a time when I am moving from a familiar place to an unfamiliar one, leaving familiar faces and seeking new ones. I think God had a hand in this. Thank God for Ashan, he made me write again.

unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar places

If baby Tom, Phoebe and Amelie, who were all born to people dear to me in the past week, were to be told of the life before them they wouldn't believe it. Would you? Even now?

It is a huge adventure into uchartered territory and I really think that 'journey' is the best word to use for it. I know its a cliche but nothing else will do. If you think of a better word to describe life, please let me know. Life is a journey of a very specific kind. It starts somewhere we don't remember and for privileged people it ends somewhere we can't predict. For people living in deprivation it can be all too predictable. But the emotional and psychological journey of our inner lives is the really interesting bit for me. What the outcome of these inner journeys of discovery might be is less certain. We are all unique and we all respond entirely differently to our birth, our life experience and our death.

Tom, Phoebe and Amelie,( in no particular order) are so, so perfect. I don't mean only physically, all babies are perfect, whatever their illnesses or physical problems. I don't mean 'faultless', I mean 'complete'. They are born complete. God knows who they are, and they don't think it matters. They don't know what has happened, why things are different, where they have come from or where they are going. They don't know what is past, or present or future. What alien land do we arrive in when we leave our mother's wombs? These babies have all been born into good natal units in comparatively well-funded hospitals, they have mothers with maternity nurses and great midwives, pain control and support throughout their pregnancy. They have home visits and are nourished enough to produce their own milk. They have food, safe houses and they have been born into prosperity and peace in a temperate climate in a country relatively free of natural disaster or famine.

But this won't protect them from their own journeys. Their lives on earth should, statistically be long and healthy compared to people grown in poverty, but they will still be human. They will be sentient beings, they will experience compassion and joy, creativity, imagination and play, they will love and laugh and they will face trials and hard times as they learn to live fully. Just like you and just like me, just like our parents and our siblings they are learning to live fully.

What is so hard to comprehend is that they are born 'complete', with their microscopic eyelashes and fingernails and their craving for milk. They are so human and precious. They have everything to teach us about hope and about living in the present with trust. What can we teach them? They remember what we have forgotten. That life is unpredictable, that we have come from somewhere unseen and unknown and incomprehensible. That we are miracles. That we are torn from the comfort of the womb. That one by one and God smiles and celebrates and lets us go. There are so many other types of 'births' afterwards as we continue to seek nourishment for survival. There are many movements from one safe, dark space to a light open dangerous territory. In both places we depend upon the love of others to nurse us into freedom and independence again.

We have already named these children, they already belong to this society, they are English and Welsh, they have blood relatives, they have been labelled 'Boy' and 'Girl' and been showered with pink and blue cards and presents. They have no idea why, they have no idea what this will mean for them. Their paths are mapped quite carefully already, but one day these paths will take unexpected turns for them and they will find themselves in unfamiliar places. Just like me, and just like you.

moving on

There are so many decisions made in one lifetime. There are so many factors which lead us to make them. There are so many responses to our decisions and so many factors which lead to the responses to our decisions that in the end some people just give up trying to make them. Every decision has consequences and risks.

There are many occasions in my life where I have wished I had decided to act differently or to do the same thing in a different way. There are decisions that I have made which people have found very difficult to live with and accept. There are decisions that people have tried to get me to change. There are times when I have decided to change my decisions.

But sometimes there are decisions that we take in order to preserve our own lives. Perhaps these are the decisions with the most brutal consequences of all. In extreme situations this can be the choice between taking someone's life or sparing it. In our interior worlds sometimes our emotional and psychological safety is at risk and we find ourselves making decisions for our own mental well-being which other people find shocking or incomprehensible. If they thought of it as a life-or-death situation in a field of war they would see it differently. I am sure of that.

Sometimes I am shocked in Pastoral work when someone is in need and the Church Community are providing support and people say that someone 'has a family and they are not doing anything for their parent even though they live locally'. There is usually a judgement being made that the son or daughter who lives in the vicinity should visit the elderly relative because they are the closest relative and the Church has other work to do with those who are totally alone. But I think differently about this. There is always something we don' t know. People are different behind closed doors. We all keep secrets, we all have complicated experiences. When someone becomes old it is considered a basic courtesy to consider them elderly and therefore vulnerable and in need of our pity and compassion. This is all true but the fact of this rarely diminishes the truth of who they were in their prime of life.

I am thinking this morning of who we are in essence. Can the monstrous mother really become a quaint and eccentric old sweetheart simply because years have passed? Can the person I was at 19 still be the same person I am at 37? Can it be that those who knew us in infancy also know us in our maturity and our old age? Can anyone speak with authority about who a person is or who they are likely to become? Our responses to our experiences and the decisions we make to ensure our survival all shape the path of our lives and they can lead us to places we do not always want to go, leaving people we do not want to leave.

I do not think I am the same person now that I was then. I would find it depressing if I were. The hopes and dreams and aspirations I held dear then would not fulfil me now. The relationships I had then would not be fruitful now. The unhelpful things I left behind me would be impossible to pick up now because I do not have the room to carry them.

Lent, Holy Week, Easter

Lent and Holy Week and Easter Day are all over now. We have all worked really hard. No one got killed or divorced. It was quite difficult at times. Much to tell but not enough words. More to follow.

Straight-talking

You will never be a truth-teller and have an easy life. Your friends will never stay friends with you and also enjoy an easy life. Arguably, you will have few friends left if you are a truth-teller and an e-mail user. It doesn't matter how sensitive and thoughtful a person you may be, put the truth in an e-mail and it can be the end of several beautiful relationships in a nanosecond. No amount of :), or o) or whatever other combinations of colons and open brackets you choose to soften the message in cyberspace they will never represent the open-arms of honest friendship, however much you try. So there is evidence to suggest that the old-timers out there who disapprove of e-mail communication as damaging to relationships have got it right. But are we just afraid of truth, preferring palatable nonsense to hard facts?

To say that being an honest person has draw-backs would have to be an understatement like no other. The spectrum of collateral damage it causes ranges from causing slight offence through annihilating an entire system of family relationships to finding yourself murdered by your enemies in cold blood or being fed to lions in a Roman ampitheatre. By far the worst consequence of possessing a 'truth valve' is that friendships of infinite value can almost collapse overnight and are often beyond retrieval.

If you suffer from Straight Talking Disease you will know that however well-managed your condition occasionally you inadvertently eat something which contains truth serum. The result of this is that you start looking like a figure of ridicule in a Shakespeare comedy, running about telling people every innappropriate thought you ever had in your head. Something occurs within you and you are suddenly a vivid adult version of the little boy who tells the Emperor he is naked while everyone else is saying how marvellous his clothes are. Randomly your mouth will open like a trapdoor and horrible stored vignettes will tumble out into the ether. "You really don't suit blue hair, bare scalp would be preferable." "God knows why you wasted your life on that, it would have been less of a waste building model aeroplanes", and so on...

Yes, we have our advantages. There are two sides to every coin. We do, like lambs to the slaughter, martyr ourselves for the sake of all the lightweights out there who don't have the guts to speak out. There are many people considered brave heroines and Saints in retrospect who were simply pains-in-the-arse in real time. Suffragettes often suffered from Straight Talking Disease. Jesus clearly had a bad case of it. I have a severe and terminal infection and nothing will ever save me or anyone else from it. It is, in short, a nightmare. I thought I had it under control, but, and here is the truth, I haven't even come close. The experience of managing the condition is a little like wearing a muzzle on my mouth like those used to quieten a yapping dog. I spend a great deal of time corsetting in all those honest remarks. I wish people knew how hard I work at it, how much worse it could have been. Although sometimes I wonder whether it is this very inhibiting of wayward truths that causes them all to come out in a rush like a guargantuan fart. Those appreciative of them are far fewer than those braced for another fall-out. Countless times I have ruined a beautiful career. When you look at our poor figures from history who didn't mince their words you can see how common an outcome it is for the straight-talker.

There are ways and means of telling truths. Most of them are uncomfortable. Climate change experts who dared to say 'the ice-cap is melting', were viewed as lunatics because we didn't want to hear it. The early re-cycling fanatics were seen as quirky eccentrics. Poor old Charles Darwin is still seen as a bit 'off the wall' by some. There was the poor fellow who said 'hmmmm I think the earth might well be round'. I seem to recall he was ex-communicated, and probably incarcerated or tortured. The now deceased man who spoke the resounding line 'There are no weapons of mass destruction' subsequently took his own life in the telling. With all of these people there is a serious case of Straight Talking Disease and I doubt whether the medium used would have affected the outcome that much. If Darwin had e-mailed a mate and said 'Hi Erasmus Junior, I think we were all once invertebrate lizards, LOL Charlie :)'...he would have been taken no more or less seriously than he was when proving it by cataloguing every species of invertebrate creature in the globe. The Suffragettes would have done themselves few favours using the internet, www.throwyourselfunderhorses.com would have done nothing to increase or decrease their popularity, although perhaps they would have seemed even more ridiculous. Whilst I find the 'e-mails texts and internet use are bad for communication' argument peddled by the older generation a bit insubstantial, sometimes I think they have a point. Although the jury is out on this.

The 'modern communications lead to misunderstandings' brigade may be right. Although 'a truth-told is a truth-told', it may be made more palatable by softening language and cuddly lighting cushioned by wine and song. On the other hand 'you are an ugly bastard and I don't fancy you' is the same in any setting. 'I'm not sure that you are really my cup of tea' said whinsomely over a flickering candle lacks the savagery of a text. Consider this example: 'nt intrstd, L8r Fatchops. u UgLy bstrd lol xxx'. It gets to the heart of the matter doesn't it? Tell me? does it leave any room for doubt? None whatsoever. At least he won't be confused or left hoping. Likewise, at least put in an e-mail the message is short and sweet and you save on the ordeal of sharing a pizza with said turn off. I think modern communications are, like their latter day hand-written counterparts unequivocal clear indications of 'where its at'. The candid e-mail is the new version of a 'Dear John' letter.

Example

a) My Dearest John, it is with utmost pleasure that I write herewith to announce to you my hitherto unspoken loathing of your attire, physiology and general air of invertebrate lizard. I cannot see that there is much to mis-understand my sweet Johnnie when I disclose to you that the invertebrate lizard, no matter how slimey and pert, flicking his tongue this way and that, can charm and woo a lady, the invertebrate is simply not likely to swim in my pond. Please accept this letter with my undeniable joy at being at last free from this undesirable acquaintance.'
NOT yours Lydia

b) E-mail
Hi John, got a bit pissed last night...lets forget about it yeah? Lyd

c)Text
Dnt cll me...

d) Face to Face candlelit dinner
Er...yeah, so, er, shall we have some more wine? Er, yeah, well, why not? Er shall we have some more wine:...

c)Text following dinner the previous evening:
Sht

You see my point?

lucky

Its been a wonderful day, spent with wonderful people who inspire me with their courage, friendship and honesty. Sometimes I think I am the luckiest person alive.

Lenten Journey: Ash Wednesday Confession

It is Ash Wednesday, a fitting time for a confessional: I am a fraudulent Church-goer. Confession is much more to do with the need to unburden ourselves than to recieve forgiveness I think. Although it also contains the search for acceptance of how we really are as people, underneath. On Sunday I had to run away in frustration from the morning service. My need to flee from Church Services has not diminished as much in five years as I had hoped it would. I thought it would be easier than this by now. It isn't just me, Graham has the same problem, but his is more excusable somehow, what with me being the one who works as a Pastor. I love the people, my glimpses of God are in the ordinary exchanges and communal activities. Sunday services fail every time to give me the same experiences and what we do on Sundays never seems to link up with my experiences of God during the week. It is as though there is an unbridgable gap for me between what we do on Sundays, something which more often feels like 'what they do on Sundays', and what I do during the week. The times I spend with people outside of Sunday services are shot through with miracle. There is dramatic courage and a complete unawareness among the people I serve that they are the ones that show me God and not the formal services in Church.

My dilemma is that I love the people who do the Sunday Services. I find it so hard to tell them how I feel about something so precious to them. I go out of duty and loyalty, out of respect and pious as it sounds, I do not go for myself. The worst part about this is that it makes me a martyr and I am continue to simply view Sunday mornings with dread and resentment. I used to think this was due to some disobedience or rebellion within myself. The first reasonable question anyone might ask is 'if it is so bad, why have you persevered for so long?'. It is a question you would ask of someone filing for divorce. We always hope for better times. It is a basic human need to hope for improvement and when we want something to work out, we keep believing that it will. I thought at first that Church services would change and become more bearable. I also thought that perhaps it was possible to be instrumental in that change. I came to believe that I could be instrumental in that change. But like any relationship which begins with a premise that one person can alter another this was a doomed endeavour. Once I had realised this I embarked on a long period of soul-searching, reaching within myself for all the resistances and prejudices and barriers which were a result of my own being. I looked to my childhood and to other aspects of my life which may have led me to feel alienated from others. I looked at my propensity to compete and to improve and raise standards. I questioned my motivation for being in Church services. Seeing that this seemed equally unchangable I began to think that I must simply attend and block all thoughts of needing to change things and accept things as they are. This worked better than anything and I devised more and more strategies for blocking out the experience. I got very involved with baking cakes, reading Bible passages, doing the prayers and reading around the subject of Church services. I believed that if I read lots of books and tried really hard to grasp at the roots of this tradition and respected its value as something that had lasted and stood the 'test of time', that I would be less conflicted about it. But this is not sustainable and does not nurture a soul. By now I had been battling for years to overcome my issues with Church Services, I believed that something would heal within me and the bad memories of Church services I carried with me would dissolve leaving room for positive ones. The healing took place but the services continued to depress and frustrate me. I devised a new method, one which has been by far the most effective. I started to see the services as the rites and rituals of another religion. I tried to realise that what was being done was 'other' to any other experience and must be treated as such. I went to a service as an onlooker trying to observe dispassionately what was going on and I detached myself to a respectful distance so that I could feel as I did when I watched my Muslim sisters at prayer. This was much more comfortable. Seeing traditions as the traditions of others makes them seem much more valuable. But nonetheless it seemed like cowardice and even seemed patronising to attend services like a sociological experiment.

Something wonderful did happen though, and this is the thing which has kept me attending despite all my tortured confusion. Communion began to matter. I found it really helpful and a point at which I abandoned reason and thought and entered into a different world. I thought that this would help, and to a certain extent it did because it motivated me to go to services and endure the rest of it. This was a positive development and at least at one point in the hour and a half proceedings on Sunday mornings I was engaged with what was happening. But it had its downside. The moment of transformational experience was five minutes long in a one and a half hour ordeal and then I became very confused about why we needed to do the rest of it. I began to wonder if I was an Anglican at all. Or whether it was an accident of birth. So the torment began afresh with me going out of necessity for about five minutes of an entire morning, and the exquisite intensity of that moment made the rest of that time interminable and excruciating. It was like taking a masterpiece of art and rolling it up and putting it in a corner and putting a blanket over it.

Now I feel I am back at the beginning of my five year journey. It is a feeling of complete failure to live up to my own expectations. It is also a deeply frustrating sense of having put heart and soul into trying to acknowledge the need for Sunday formal worship and trying every possible means with which to engage with and tolerate it, with a disappointing outcome. I am an Anglican and this means that I am part of a tradition which values consistency and repetition. I long for variety and the tradition imposes regularity. I long to be involved and use my skills to frame this beautiful thing, I want to be able to hear a voice that is a different voice. Anglicanism is an Episcopal religion with a comittment to Ordained ministry. I must accept that my place is to sit and endure it and to attend on behalf of those who cannot, or to go at a different time in a different context.

The worst time for going to a Church service is when we are most in need. Those desperately depressed or anxious will never go to formal services. It is too hard. Those who have been abused will never risk The Peace which involves physical contact with strangers. Those with claustrophobia will find there too little liberty with which to flee without making account of themselves. Those with secrets will not want to spend time with people asking 'what is wrong'? Those who cannot engage with what happens in Church on Sunday morning will mostly be kind honest people who would not want to offend those who need these rituals. Those with consciences will not be prepared to say things they don't believe (something which to my shame I do every Sunday).

I feel such terrible shame over my feelings towards Church. Most of the people I deeply love have dedicated their lives to this passion. I don't want to hurt them. But when I sit week after week, desperately trying to distract myself, thinking of all the contributions I might never be able to make, with skills I desperately hope one day to use I am on the verge of tears most of the time.

Am I such a total fool not to have embraced my own difference? I think so. I think I am on the edge of a wonderful discovery that it is not a thing of shame to be unable to relate to this thing that is of such an alien texture in such a foreign language. It is a wonderful pleasure and privilege on the few occasions when I do not feel despair at spending yet another hour and a half of my life watching people I love enjoying a banquet which is not to my taste.

Sometimes following the teachings of Jesus is sacrificial in ways we might not immediately suspect. For me, my cross to bear, is the formal proceedings which those I love hold so dear. What I must remember is that they will forgive me. I have given it my best shot. I am not a coward and I am tenacious. The people who love me acknowledge that and might even be pleased for me that I have reached a point in my life at which I am no longer going to beat myself up for being someone who is alienated by Formal Worship. They have always known that I can't help it and that it is who I am. My Church-going friends have always known better than I have that it is that very isolation and marginalisation which makes it so instinctive to me to insist upon proper unequivocal hospitality. That hospitality is to the stranger in myself.

The dreaded word

I had a discussion with some friends on Wednesday about many things but what sticks in my mind is the sheer horror that the term 'Christian' evokes. Hardly anyone admitted to ever using it as a term. One friend said she thinks Christian is a term attributed to us by other people. It is not, for us, anyway a way of referring to ourselves. Most of the people I know at Church, or involved there, would genuinely never use it, those that do would be in the minority. Among my friends it is not a way of referring to ourselves, even the Vicars wouldn't do so.

We established that there is a vast difference between following Christ's teachings, 'being a follower of Christ', or 'being a follower of The Way', or 'being in Christ' and being referred to as a Christian. But despite all this, some of us would put it on a form under 'Religion', because it is then generally understood that we are not following any other Religious system. As always with labels it is more effective in defining what we are not, than what we are. Speaking for myself, filling in a form is the only time I would use this term and this is because there is no room for lengthy sentences in those little boxes. I might put 'Anglican' though, because this gives an even clearer idea of what I am not.

The word 'Christian' is now popularly understood to be synonymous with brutal bigotry, hypocrisy and a general rejection of Christ's teachings to 'Love one another as ourselves'. It makes people cringe and flee. My worst nightmare is the person who announces their arrival with 'Hello I'm Johnny...and I'm a Christian', as though anyone were remotely interested, or worse still, the person who pronounces that 'because I'm a Christian I care about 'x, y or z', as though no one else is capable of any form of caring.

The term Christian has been hijacked by the loud-voiced Fundamentalists who peddle ignorant their ignorant, cruel creeds of discrimination and terror. Although clearly this is not new, because throughout history the loudest voices have been the ones we have heard. The Liberal Philanthropists, the transformative musicians, the architects and charity workers, the willing volunteers, the kind, the compassionate, the human have largely lost their claim to be Christian. They are not remembered as motivated by Christ's teachings in the way, for example the Crusaders are remembered for being motivated to kill by a mis-reading of Christ's teaching. We have had Christian Suffragettes, Christian Anti-Slavery campaigners, Christian hospital builders, Christian University establishers, Christian artists, Christian Sculptors, Christian Composers and Christian Reformers. The work Christian has largely been taken from these people who openly and proudly proclaimed themselves Christian and given to people whose view of the world narrows with time. The deep humanity and contribution to society that Christians have unarguably made along with our other Religious brothers and sisters eclipsed as it is by Conservative, prohibitive, inhibiting legalism is largely considered to be the result of secular rationalism.

My own religion in the media is presented as representing the things I most despise. There is good reason for this and it makes it very difficult to be proud of our label.

I would settle for being a Follower of The Way or In Chirst...but that makes me sound like a freak as well.

Off for a massage...

Banners

My lovely friend Pauline, also known as Aunty P, 'P' or Brown Owl, depending upon how you know her, did something wonderful yesterday. She organised a 'banner making' event in Church. There were young people and their Mums. No Dads unfortunately. The children were absorbed in the crafts but the Mums were equally drawn into the simple act of being creative. We don't do enough of these fun creative occasions. There were three banners being created. One banner that was being made was for the new area of the Church created so the children can have fun in a safe space. Another was a 'Welcome' banner. The other is an 'Allelluia Banner' which involves loads of decorated paper eggs created by various members of the Church as well as people who 'don't do Church'. It is an ancient tradition which Pauline has revived for us. The banner will be hidden for Lent and re-appear at Easter.

It was a lovely couple of hours. There were feather rainbows being made in all the colours of the rainbow, including indigo and orange and violet. There were coloured ribbons and buttons, strips of organza and linen. There were hands coated in poster paints of lilac, yellow, green and any other colour you care to mention. There was gummy glue sticking everything and everyone together. We were glittered, and beaded. There were animals for Noah's Ark, including a fish called 'Bob' (because fish go 'bob, bob, bob' when they are swimming. There was even a duck with a pearl necklace. Noah's Ark had a little purple glitter door. All the eggs had the children's names on them declaring their belonging in the community. These are the sort of occasions that organisations like Brownies and Churches have licence and opportunity to do, where others don't. We have the space, we have the legal status, the certificates to prove we are safe to ensure Child Protection. We have the time, the resources and the inclination. For me, it is at times like this that it all seems worth it, not in Church on Sunday mornings. I see God in the children and I see God at work in my friend Pauline, although she will never forgive me for saying so.

The children and their trusting little faces full of laughter and their stories speak to me powerfully about why I do this work. I heard about a fish called 'Brian' who died and had a Fish burial ceremony in the garden. There were other fish stories, brought on by the presence of the lilac-glitter encrusted 'Bob'. Some, less fortunate fish are unceremoniously flushed down the loo I'm afraid. One little girl, to her own embarrassment asked me 'what do you want to be when you grow up?'. Not knowing the answer, I said 'oh I think I will be a funeral director for fishes'. 'We are going to be comedians' two little girls said, 'we are going to stand here and amuse you.' I thought it seemed like a worthwhile cause and so did they. Hopefully our Government won't impose a 'target' for them to reach where they have to make us laugh ten times each so that we can quantify and justify the investment.

If as Religious people we forget that God is not contained to Church and if we forget Jesus' words of being 'like little children' in order to 'inherit the Kingdom of God' we lose sight of God altogether. Many of the Mums of these children and the children themselves would not normally step inside a Church. My friend who 'doesn't do Church either has brought them there. With them, these people who don't understand why we go to Church at all, God speaks to us of the enormous capacity for human thriving. I sense the love of God in their peaceful sense of the importance of living, laughing, dreaming, trusting, creating, dancing, singing, munching chocolate, friendship, love, telling stories, amusing and entertaining one another. For me this is what God is all about.

'I could have been really thin, if I didn't love food so much'.

Having lost a substantial amount of weight and breathing the words 'only half a stone to go' every Monday after a year of sensible eating I have realised why I never lose that last half a stone. Everytime I breathe those words I subsequently eat like a pig. No one needs to get a degree to work this out.

I have spent the weekend gorging on lemon meringue pie, chicken in cream sauce, cheese and biscuits, nuts, chocolate cheesecake, chocolates, hand-made luxury butter, home-made fruit tea cake and probably even worse. These are foods whose sole purpose is to make us fatter. They are designed to round our hips, increase our cup size, bloat our stomachs and make our legs rub together. How I can justify the complete bewilderment every Monday morning that 'I've put it all back on again and simply cannot understand it' is anyone's guess. I am starting to think that I am afraid of the substantial cost of replacing my substantial lingerie collection with a less substantial cup size. Either this or I have convinced myself that Mr B will stop loving me if I'm skinny. Fond as he undoubtedly is of my substantial nature. Or, more likely still, I won't know what to do without the anxiety of 'needing to lose that extra half a stone'. It is quite ridiculous. I am intent upon locking myself into this discontentment.

I don't think I really am unhappy enough with my body. This is practically a crime these days. We are supposed to have 'issues with our body image'. We are also supposed to have a 'target'. This target consists of being something we are not. Then we are supposed to move the target even further away. I wasn't prepared to be happy with an easier more achievable target, namely the one I've already reached, and I can't be bothered to set another one. Originally I set myself a target, yet another stone away from this one. But it never appeared on the horizon and now I have made friends with my hips, am enjoying my over-enthusiastic breasts and don't particularly mind having a bit of a wiggle. Climbing the stairs is no longer hard work because I now walk for a couple of miles each day and this makes me feel self-righteous enough. It never occurred to me that staying at this weight and fluctuating around it would satisfy me. I didn't even once think I might grow 'cool with my BMI baby!'. Weighing the size of a small aircraft wasn't pleasant but I can now walk up a hill now without collapsing.

Someone pointed out a simple truth to me, and if he was an 'ex-friend' before he assaulted my vanity, he's a triple ex now. He suddenly said 'you've never been exactly slim'. I was a bit put out by this revelation. I was quite sure that I had been...once. But he did me a favour in the end because its absolutely true. Even as a toddler I had chubby little thighs and, though I know I will regret sharing this, my nickname was 'Pud'. On really bad days the long version was employed. Yes, I was known as 'Pudding'. This is my gift to you today. Please enjoy it.

At one time I was a very balletic character. But I was turned down by Elmhurst Ballet School because 'I wasn't the right shape'. I always assumed it was because of my rump. Or simply because I had curves that wouldn't go away. I have always longed to shop in the 'petite' section of Monsoon. I have longed to wear size 3 shoes instead of my flipper-shaped size 8 (and a half). I have always wondered what it must be like to wake up in a size 8 body instead. The odd thing is, that when I tried being a size 10 for a solitary Summer it just didn't make that much difference to anything. The down-side being that I had to buy a wardrobe-full of clothes that I wore for the same solitary season.

I don't think I'm going to worry about it anymore. I am who I am. I am no more likely to suddenly be wearing my shoe-size as a dress than I am to be wearing size 3 shoes. The problem is, I don't really want to. I am reminded of my sister-in-law who once said 'I could have been really thin, if I didn't love food so much'. She's a genius.

Laughter

In England many of us Religous types have been watching a series called 'Around the World in 80 Faiths'. In said programme a particularly eccentric Church of England Priest is literally travelling the world in a floppy hat experiencing 80 different faiths. If I'm honest, I feel jealous. Anglicans in particular are not renowned for our capacity for having fun. Even when we are trying to be 'lively' it takes a superlative effort and has a forced air about it. Anglicans in English society are stereotyped as seriously humourless. While the Hindus in India are having dung fights and dousing each other with Vermillion paint and the Sufis are whirling... we aren't.

The most exciting it gets is our wild use of a limited pallette of liturgical colour. Every now and then we go crazy and swap purple altar cloths for Scarlet. Recently I have become very enamoured of sitting in silence. But it has its limitations. Yesterday three of us met for our half hour of Silent Prayer. This is really a form of meditation. It is like a Quaker meeting. We sit in a semi-circle in silence around a candle. This form of prayer can become desperately serious. In fact a great deal of religious activity can become a very serious matter. This is generally thought to be a good thing. We want to take what we do seriously. The danger comes when we start to take ourselves too seriously.

Which is why yesterday afternoon and the day before that was so good for us all. In Churches there is great focus on prayer and silence and listening intently to each other, God and ourselves. There is earnest commitment to transformation and growth. We are always striving to do things more effectively and to improve what we do so that it is more helpful. There is relentless work to be something a skeptical population can take seriously. It can make for sombre weeks. We have many meetings with intense discussion. We are always looking out for people and, as you know, dealing with traumatic realities. But yesterday and the day before we simply laughed and laughed and laughed. It was such a relief.

For me there is a tendency to take life and myself too seriously anyway. This tendency is exacerbated by being a religious person. It is intensified further by spending so much time with religious people in religious settings. But I have always loved a laugh too and was very prone to giggling as a child. Children understand about laughter. They know it is necessary. They are right. When we were children we knew how to laugh out loud for hours on end about absolutely nothing.

On one occasion of hilarity I was sitting in a circle trying to take myself seriously, and pulling my face into a pious, earnest demeanour. On the other I gave up trying.

On the first occasion I was in a setting with people I didn't know, being watched from a distance by friends who knew I was trying to keep a straight face. On the second I was with two friends who are both very funny, our Silent Prayer meeting ended up being a 'Laughter meeting'. My friend suggested that we advertise future conventions in the Newsletter as 4.00pm Silent Laughter, 5.00pm Raucous laughter and 6.00pm Hysterical Laughter.

On the first occasion my friends had abandoned me to my fate. I was sat with many earnest characters perpetually singing one line chants and interspersing them with tightly choreographed silences. There is a limit to how much time we can spend singing 'The Lord is My Light' whilst sitting in the dark. I couldn't meet the eyes of my mischievous friends and so I was pretending to pray fervently about important matters. What I was actually doing was fervently praying that the laughter wouldn't spill out in a torrent. Eventually it did after a torturous Forty-Five minutes. I had to walk away in a calm and ordered manner through the cavernous space, seeking a private place where I could release the illicit humour. I tried to be meditative as I fled and not click my heels on the tiles. I walked into the little room at the back and silently laughed and laughed until my sides hurt and I started to make little snorting and squeaking noises. I hid with a friend and was unable to speak. There had been something about the piety of those around me. All those eyes closed with beatific smiles and eyebrows slightly raised. There is an unwritten law that when we religious people pray together we place our hands on our laps facing upwards and together in an attitude of 'recieving'. I have always resisted the urge but it is contagious and I caught this disease. I find that I sit raising my own eyebrows expectantly, my own face smiling beatifically, with my hands placed accurately on my lap. It is a matter of time before I am wearing a knitted , striped hand-knitted jumper with motifs all over it and a strange fish-shaped necklace. This I have so far resisted but I know I am far from immune. By Summer I am likely to be wearing open toed, sensible, velcro-fixed, practical sandals and ear-rings in the shape of crucifixes. As the Piety Syndrome becomes more advanced I will be using words like 'challenge' and 'radical'. There is no medication for this disease. It is inevitable. What concerns me is that the disease at its most severe actually robs us of our sense of humour. People forget that God gave us laughter. God didn't ever give us a commandment that said 'thou shalt sit in circles wearing odd clothes with not even a twitch of humour in your soul'. Unfortunately we seem to have made this 'no amusement commandment' up. It is inscribed in Pious Law along with all the other odd conventions which have crept in: wearing beards and sandals among them. There is a new tradition of wearing odd plastic bangles with coded inscriptions like WWJD embossed into the wristband as though we live in such persecution in England that morse code is the only way. I assure you that my time spent in a room of twenty such characters all sitting mute with hands in a scooping motion waiting to catch the Lord's grace recovered my sense of humour. As I surreptitiously looked up during an accurately timed 'Long Silence' I caught twenty pairs of eyelids closed lightly in adoring contemplation, fish-necklaces twinkling above the neckline of a hand-knit jumper and I lost it completely.

I made the fatal decision of checking that it wasn't just me. I glanced sideways at my friend who has the odd defect of being a religious person possessing an outrageous sense of humour. Mistake. Big mistake. My stomach started involuntarily jumping and I started making tiny coughing noises, air escaping accidentally from my nostrils. It was unbearable. The more amused I became the severe they all looked. The more laughter that came the more disapproving they all felt. I didn't know what to do about it. But the situation was about to worsen. Two other friends, not infected with religiosity had decided to observe my humiliation from a distance. These grown adults, regressing with the classroom atmosphere had hidden behind some pews in the children's area. I couldn't see them committing their crimes. But I could hear them. They started to titter. At my most desparate they became unable to contain themselves. The tittering became muffled squawking. They began to sound convincingly hysterical. Mr Hand-knit to my right obviously fancied himself as Priestly Male and took on the responsibility of managing what increasingly sounded like two people having nervous breakdowns. He took a break from showing off his middle-class Latin, while the rest of us continued to sing in English and loped into the darkness in search of his opportunity to display his pastoral expertise. I was too helpless to concentrate on this activity at the back of the Church. I couldn't save them from him. He returned looking bewildered after some time using his Vicar voice. I was to find out later that he had found two adult women lying on their backs on the carpet doing 'Meercat impressions'. Evidently they had originally been 'playing meercats' by peering secretly over the pews and bouncing up and down. Unfortunately he found them embarrasingly lying down, losing the plot in full character as Mr and Mrs Meercat. "Are you alright?", he asked, in what was possibly the most unneccessary sentence uttered. My wonderfully honest, un-infected friend still resisting Piety Disorder was frank with Mr Handknit. She replied honestly to his unsubtle request for her to shut up which had been neatly disguised as deep concern. She wasn't sure, she said. 'Not really' she said. 'I'm not sure whether I'm hysterical or not' (she'd had a bad day). The fact of her meercat impression in the children's area probably could have answered his question. Mr Handknit faced with two hysterical Meercats was, surprisingly, inclined to return to his Latin, apparently less concerned for her welfare than he had initially declared. The Vicar voice is clearly not adequate for dealing with hysterical women. He absented himself and at this point a secret sqeal emerged from the gloom. I thought it was going to kill me and the heaving in my stomach muscles began again, little spasms that I couldn't contain and I was convinced the little group of good people were going to think I was having a 'Harry met Sally moment'. But it was never going to be an orgasm in an atmosphere like that. The worst of it was that laughter was much more outrageous than sexual ecstasy in a Holy Place. At least Latin-speaking Vicars could refer me for medical treatment for being too fleshly. At least he could have quoted Theresa of Avila and the sculpture of her at the climax of her 'rapture. But I was not in rapture, I was in carnal torture. I eventually fled when the final silence fell. I went into hiding in the Vestry weeping with slapping my thighs like a lunatic and banging my head on the table, wheezing and gasping while the unsuspecting Ann looked on in surprise.

Yesterday it still hadn't worn off. I met with another Syndrome-free friend and the anomoly from the night before with the outrageous humour. We met, ostensibly, for Silent Prayer but it never happened. The outrageous anomoly, it transpired had been seated in the circle the night before concentrating on the dial on her watch while I was in spasms and our Meercat friends were acting out their bizarre therapy on the children's carpet. The other Syndrome-free friend had stayed at home while we suffered, she had not, she declared, been able to face it.

As we discussed the Meercats, the Latin-speaking hand-knits, the squealing in the Vestry we moved onto even worse memories of Pious gatherings and the totally unacceptable moments when our humour got the better of us and we had met the twinkle in another's eye.

moody blues

The new night light in the dining room has upset the cats. Mr B, feeling seasonably climate aware, decided to do the moral thing and get a low-energy one when the last one died on us leaving us stumbling around in the dark. Since I had an insomnia night last night at 4 am I stumbled into the dining room to find the cats not neatly curled up on their special cushion. Not snoozing and dreaming their noses scrunched into the hand-woven fabric. Not twitching their paws with imaginary mice in their claws. None of these. The cats greeted me with wild panic in their eyes. Anyone would think they had suddenly become aware of the Financial Crisis and that they had realised that they could be meat-free and facing starvation. They pleaded with me and ran to my ankles, tripping me up and screeching at me. They looked really confused and blinded and kept staring at the new eco-friendly night light as though it were a UFO re-fuelling on its way from outer-space. They kept wailing in cat-speak 'what the hell is that?'. I have never seen them move so fast and they fled upstairs to crawl into bed with Mr B, racing past another terrifying alien monster on the landing.

It is true that it has an alarming quality about it, though I thought they were being a little over-dramatic. It is neon-blue which screams melodrama and catastrophe. I hate eco-friendly light bulbs. By night they reduce our lovely warm-toned house to a space with the feel of a Crime Scene Investigation. I keep expecting to see areas of the living room cordoned off with striped tape and unreasonably attractive pathologists pulling on rubber gloves. On positive nights it is more industrial kitchen than mortuary which has more promise as an ambience. Even the ostentatious 'bought on a whim' lamp once referred to by an ex-friend as a 'pair of tart's knickers' hasn't been spared by global warming. Mr B has really gone all-out for the environment and now the taut leopard-skin and feather boa boudoir lamp has a strange coil-shaped device inserted into it. This 'ex-friend' once famously said of this Burlesque lamp that 'he didn't know whether to sleep with it or kick it out of bed'. Now I think he would find this a much easier decision since she is reduced to blue-green toned sanitised utlitarian appearance. More operating theatre gown than negligee.

When people look back on the 'noughties', they will remember it not in black or white or in flamboyant colours but in a strange bluey-greeney sallow sickly tone. Films of 2009 will be characterised by this melancholy bleakness. It is strangely symbolic that the 'depression years' will be remembered with this textureless flat sooth-saying doom-laden light. Cats are creatures of instinct. I am sure they would want to save the planet as much as the rest of us but even so they will never compromise on the mood of a night by the fire.