Separation anxiety

Posted on 11/08/2013 by Rambling Rector

I’m such a fraud. I write about the need to let go of the past, and get rid of attachments. If only I could do it myself.

It’s not easy finding a raison d’être once the ‘children’ have left home. Maybe this was less of a problem when adults died younger and when people didn’t move far from home. But now, having ‘children’ scattered here, there and everywhere is a real heart-piercer. When the separation is a result of one’s own decisions, rather than random circumstances, there is the added layer of guilt.

When we came to Ireland in 1988, our daughter went straight to secondary school, but the boys were in cathedral choir schools in England. They remained there for 1 and 3 years until they came to secondary school in Dublin. In those days it was the small Fokkers that flew to and from East Midlands and Leeds/Bradford, and the memory of watching our little fellers walking across the tarmac to the plane at Dublin airport still destroys me. We lived near the Sugar Loaf in Co Wicklow and from the house we could see the St Columba plying between Dun Laoghaire and Holyhead. It was excruciating to watch it on its way east. How I wished I were on it. Sometimes I went to see them on my own in the car, arriving at Holyhead about 3 am. The journey on the A5/A55 was usually accompanied by the BBC world service, Lilliburlero screaming out of the radio at about Colwyn Bay. Soon, the joy of reunion, the delight of being with them. One particularly ecstatic episode of an unexpected visit is vivid. Then the agony of separation. And all self-inflicted.

It’s not that I want them at my beck and call. I don’t. I don’t want to influence their lives. I feel as if the only thing I want to do is to be of service to them. Well, now I’ve written that, I see that that is in a way trying to influence them. Paradox. Having passed my genes on, I am now expendable, biologically useless, merely titrating the time remaining to me above ground. Previous accomplishments pale into insignificance, particularly when they came at the cost of not paying attention to important relationships. Maybe I am too hard on myself, but I think—indeed I know, based on what I am told by those who open their hearts to me—that I am not alone in feeling like this. Parents, and men in particular, are caught between, on the one hand, the demands of having to ‘pretend’ to be enthusiastic about targets and strategies and plans and pleasing bosses and watching one’s back, and, on the other, the guilt that arises from the way that this distracts from relationships that matter. It sometimes felt like prostitution. In my previous post I quoted Bronnie Ware’s book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, in which she wrote that every man she nursed wished he hadn’t worked so hard. You can see why.

Life is messy. Someone once said that grief is the price we pay for love. I wonder how diplomats cope with the grief of having their children at boarding school overseas. It’s not something I would do again: I’ve not recovered from the first time yet.

Trust and be silly

Posted on 10/08/2013 by Rambling Rector

The weekly sermon. It’s relentless, What can I say that I haven’t said before? I vowed I wouldn’t say anything that wasn’t true for me. Aaaargh! Then, as I was pondering, an idea came into my head. The pondering took place, as it so often does, in what people call the smallest room of the house. There are sound biological reasons for this, by the way, and they involve the Vagus (tenth cranial) nerve, which is part of the parasympathetic nervous system that has to do with, among other things, relaxation and the opening of sphincters. I suppose I’d better stop there, but there’s a piece in a recent New Scientist that explains a bit more. (Or you could read my textbook on Cranial Nerves.)

The thing that came into my head was an image of David and Goliath. I’m not quite sure where it came from, but anyway came it did. David the lad versus Goliath the hero. And David killed him. They weren’t expecting that. What sticks in my mind is an easily missed detail in the build-up. Saul gives the young David all his armour because, presumably, he thinks the boy David has no chance without it. David tries it on and says ‘no thanks, too heavy, I can’t move in all this clobber, I’ll be better without it’. That’s the part of the David and Goliath story that I find arresting.

No armour. Armour is heavy and limits movement. The armour that we cover ourselves with consists of things like preconceptions, assumptions, prejudgments, notions. We spend a lot of time trying to make sure that our lives will be predictable so that we don’t have to move within our inflexible ‘armour’. We try to manipulate people so that they do things that we can cope with. We want to feel that we’re in charge. The trouble is that if we’re in charge like that, we’re not open to inspiration, we’re not flexible, we’re not responsive to changing needs. Think how many businesses go under because they are not responsive and so can’t cope with change. It’s just the same.

If we are to live, as opposed merely to exist, we need flexibility. We need to resist the temptation to dress ourselves in restrictive armour: David ditched ‘all this clobber’ and marched off to meet Goliath full of confidence that since he could deal with lions and bears that attacked his sheep, he wouldn’t have any difficulty in decking the big man. And he was right. We need to take the risk, like David did, of stepping out without conditions, restrictions, safety nets, assumptions, efforts to manipulate. In Christian-speak you’d say that the Lord wants us to trust him enough to live with him unafraid, totally defenceless in his presence. The ancient Greek word for this is pistis, and in Greek mythology Pistis was the personification of good faith, trust and reliability. Pistis is the intellectual and emotional acceptance of a proposition. It’s a decision. Faith is a decision. We decide to trust.

Trust in the uncertainty of life. Trust not to be fearful of possibilities. Work with the cosmos, don’t fight it. Part of me would love to fight with the silliness of the institutional church and institutionalized people in it, but there’s no point. Let them at it. For us all, it means working with what we’ve got and enjoying it while it lasts. And if it goes before we do, we work with something else rather than moan how good things used to be—an empty-headed activity according to Ecclesiastes (in the Bible so it must be true). Let go of trying to control. Let go of what ‘I’ want. Let go of ‘ego’. ‘Do not be afraid’. Step out, be ready, be alert to possibilities, be responsive. This means having faith in, trusting in, our own personal ability to make decisions as circumstances arise. In my theology, this means making contact with, and having faith in, the inner divine core, the boy David within each of us. This brings us on the road to holiness. At Christmas we sing ‘O holy Child of Bethlehem, be born in us today.’ We can sing it every day.

Life is messy and unpredictable. Despite what anyone may tell us, or what we in the privileged West may think, we are not in control. We simply don’t know what’s around the corner. Acceptance of uncertainty is the key to living in the moment, and living in the moment is the key to eternal life—eternal being a quality of life outside time, not everlasting. When we acknowledge our powerlessness, and discard attachments, there is nothing left for us to stand on our dignity about, so pride (hubris) goes too. Think how much better the world would be without that sort of pride, based as it is on the notion that ‘I’m better than you’.

I know—this is hard. I say these things not because I’m good at them, but because I’d like to be. But we’ve got to start sometime, and the right time is always now, before it’s too late. Bronnie Ware, a nurse working in palliative care, recently wrote The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, based on her experience. Here they are (my summaries, not hers):

I wish I’d had the courage to live my life rather than the life others expected of me. Most people die knowing that their lives have been limited by their choices.
I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. This came from every man the author nursed. It is true for me. I missed a good deal of my children’s youth and Susan’s companionship.
I wish I’d had the courage to say what I felt. Many people don’t say what they think in an attempt to keep peace. They settle for a mediocrity. The frustration, bitterness and resentment that build up inside can cause heart disease and cancer.
I wish I’d stayed in touch with friends.
I wish I’d let myself be happier. Happiness is a choice. Misery is a choice. People stay stuck in old habits. Fear of change makes us pretend to others and to ourselves that we are content, when deep within, we long to laugh and be silly. There is not enough innocent silliness in this world.

So there you are! Ditch the notions. Trust in uncertainty. Be silly.

Proper 14, Year C

Simple

Posted on 03/08/2013 by Rambling Rector

Layers

Homily for 4 August 2013 (Proper 13, Year C)

Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23. Psalm 49:1-12. Colossians 3:1-11.Luke 12:13-21

Simple.

Not simple as in lacking, stupid, inadequate, unsophisticated, not quite all there. Not that sort of simple, the sense in which the word is often used. A somewhat derogatory meaning.

But simple in the way that it is properly used. In Latin, simplex: single, whole, having one ingredient, plain. Simple in the way that mathematicians and philosophers use the word: indivisible, incapable of being splintered—the opposite of diabolical. Innocent, modest, free from ostentation, unmixed.

Here is an image of our psychological development. We begin simple and whole in the Garden of Eden. We see the world around us and begin to make judgments. We begin to clothe ourselves with finery (fig leaves) to make ourselves look more and more impressive. We surround ourselves with layer after layer, like a Matryoshka doll. Each hurt brings more and more scar tissue. We become heavier and more complex, weighed down, more and more rigid, less and less adaptable. There’s more to break down. Like electric gadgets in the car, they’re more difficult and more expensive to fix. The opposite of simple.

Simple is a beautiful word. A restful word even.

It’s easy to read today’s Gospel story as if it were about redistribution of resources. I am nervous about preaching such a message because it soon sounds sanctimonious: look how good I am because I ‘graciously’ give my stuff away. When I attack the mega-rich, it sounds suspiciously like envy. The Archbishop of Canterbury recently said that if he’d been working in the financial services he couldn’t say that he would have behaved any better than the sharp suited barrow boys who’ve got us into this mess. And neither could I. As has been said: ‘it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor.’

We live in a society where governments and the advertising industry encourage us to indulge ourselves with what we don’t need. The Lotto! How would you deal with winning millions? Go round the world? Buy this and that? Buy posh clothes? Eat and drink fine food and wine? So what? After all this, you are the same you, but now with new sensations behind you. Your quest for new experiences—for that’s what it is—means that it’s now harder for you to experience the same degree of novelty. You need more and more of whatever it is to get the same degree of stimulation. There’s plenty of biological evidence for this: the biology of addiction. The more we have, the more we want. This is greed. It becomes dangerous for the community when we wilfully accumulate so that others are deprived. We possess – a terrible word. We think we are self-sufficient. If we have enough in the barn, we won’t need anyone else. We become lonely and paranoid. Greed shows a lack of love and trust.

Psalm 17:10: They are inclosed in their own fat and their mouth speaketh proud things.

My precioussssss

It seems to me that today’s gospel story is not about renunciation, though there is plenty in Jesus’ message about exactly that. Today’s story seems more about how to cope with good fortune. It’s not about giving it away: it’s about sharing it. By sharing we demonstrate our connectedness, our not being separate. The Good Samaritan shared his wealth. When we keep things to ourselves we become wizened and twisted and consumed, like Gollum. We become being inclosed in our own fat, behind electric gates and security fences.

The alternative is to stop trying to accumulate goods and feelings and emotions. Simply exist and enjoy. Simply. Living with trust, directed towards the Divine, reminds us that there’s no point thinking that possessing more and more will make us immortal and invincible. Let’s share what we have—time, talents, money—before it’s too late. That’s what the men in today’s story need to be doing.

St Paul recommends that we kill everything that belongs to the earthly life, especially greed, which is like worshipping a false god. To attempt to keep possessions and memories locked ‘in a barn’ is like chasing after wind. Vanity of vanities. We can not recover the feelings we once had, we can not find the same stimulation we once found. All passion spent. This is a great blessing: I can relax. It doesn’t matter what I have or what I’ve done. What matters is who I am and how I share what I am.

A rich woman dies. Where there’s a will, there are relatives! How much did she leave? She left everything.

In our lives we move from simple to complex and hopefully to simple again. The wisdom of age.

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come ‘round right.

I want to be alone

Posted on 31/07/2013 by Rambling Rector

So you’re in the Garden of Eden, right, and you’re watching the drama of Adam and Eve unfold, with the talking snake and the scrumping of apples. There’s something very strange. The snake talks to the woman who seems to be alone. The big question is: where is the man? We’re told that Eve was created from Adam’s rib, surgery having been performed while yer man was asleep. Biologists have recently managed to grow rudimentary teeth from cells in human urine, so I suppose the woman-from-rib story has something going for it even if cell biology labs in the Garden of Eden weren’t like the ones we have now. A different version of the story from Hebrew literature goes like this: when the Holy One created Adam, the creature had a female aspect facing one way and a male aspect facing the other. The Holy One then sawed the creature in half giving the (now two) creatures a back for one part and a back for the other. So both man and woman were created from a hermaphrodite first creation. Now, that’s more likely, isn’t it? It explains why men and women see things differently—they look in opposite directions, the push-me-pull-you. Anyhow, back to the question: where was Adam? Well, it’s universally acknowledged that men make more fuss of being ill than women, so he was probably taking longer to recover from major surgery than Eve, thus unable to engage in intercourse with the snake. On the other hand—and I think this much the more likely explanation—he was where any self-respecting man would be: hiding from the missus in his garden shed.

Up to now, gentle reader, you might think I’m taking the micturition (though the Hebrew commentary story is authentic). But I have a serious point to make, and it’s this. We all need time alone, and men in particular do. As we get older, we need our solitude more and more. It’s an unfortunate fact that in today’s world success is judged by ‘outgoingness’ and extraversion. The go-getters and self-publicists are rewarded, and the more retiring folk are not. We are required by economic demands to join in the culture of back-slapping hail-fellow-well-met seminars and team exercises and confrontational ‘discussions’ at meetings where testosterone wins. For many of us, this is a real effort. For those of us whose energy comes not from company but from solitude, it’s exhausting to play at being an extravert for any length of time. After a while we long to back home with a book or listening to music or whatever. In my case, my groove on the sofa sings a siren song.

I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said, ‘I want to be left alone.’

The terms extravert and introvert are used for, respectively, those whose energy comes from interaction with others, and those whose energy comes from rich inner resources. Many of us who seem to be extraverts are actually introverts who have learnt to put on an act as required. And I’m pretty sure that there are more introvert men than is commonly thought.

In my former career, I was disturbed to find important decisions being forced at the meetings at which the issue had first been raised, thus without considered reflection. The idea that we might defer decision until we’d had time to think about the issue was derided as indicating a lack of purpose and courage and commitment. People in power tend to be extraverts—after all, they do better at interview, are better at selling themselves, and are more likely to charm interviewers. And so the cycle perpetuates itself.

A new book Quiet by Susan Cain explores this issue. The author points out that the world needs introverts. We need people who say ‘just hold on a minute, we must think about this’. We need people who don’t just rush into decisions without considering implications.

Our culture makes it easier, I think, for women to recharge than for men. Boys and men who like to be alone, who have solitary pursuits, are looked upon strangely. They are urged to ‘come out of their shell’, to ‘pull up their socks’, to ‘stop shilly-shallying’, to be more like your cousin ‘who climbed Everest when he was six’. This displays more than a little intolerance. It’s not easy for anyone, let alone a child, to say ‘this is me, you will have to accept that I’m not the person you’d like me to be—I am as I am.’

As Susan Cain says, it’s time that we acknowledged the value of introverts. Without them we would have no theories of gravity and relativity, a good deal less technological innovation, and next to no music, art and literature. With more of them I suspect we’d have had far fewer disasters caused by impulsive risk-taking.

Science and self

Posted on 27/07/2013 by Rambling Rector

New Scientist has jiggled my little grey cells recently.

You are not alone

We have creatures living in us and on us. We’d die without them, especially the ones in the gut that help us digest food. Some of them are not good for us, though, and these are parasites. They take, take, take—there’s no give with a parasite. Did you know that parasitism is the most popular lifestyle on Earth? Up to now you may have thought it confined to adolescents who lie moping on the couch all day. Some of you may have, or have had, personal experience of this curious parasitic life form that lives at the expense of its host(s). Perhaps you harbour the wish to turn the tables and one day, in your dotage perhaps, become parasitic on those who treated you as their host. We can all dream. You may have seen parasites in or on your pets. You may even have them yourself: worms and malaria for example (if so, hopefully now recovered). Anyway, the point is that you and I are never alone.

Depression

Sometimes it feels as if we have parasites living in our minds. They suck well-being from us. They used to be called demons, but now we call them other things. One of the commonest is depression. At least 1 person in 6 has to deal with this some stage. It seems that the most popular antidepressants are not as effective as was once thought. Or perhaps it’s better to say that drug-resistant depression is on the rise. New treatments involving magnetism and electricity (not the old-style ECT) are being investigated. If brain waves can affect the external environment—and they can, otherwise EEG/EKGs wouldn’t work—then magnetic and electrical forces might affect the brain. Perhaps someone some day will explain to me exactly what magnetism and electricity are. The anaesthetic ketamine might also have its uses. Indirectly it helps nerve cells in the brain to grow new bits and pieces—which is a good thing for depressives. So maybe depression is not only a chemical thing, but also a structural thing—the shape of nerve cells is affected in depression. Then again, there’s the moon. It’s reported that the full moon makes people edgier. Well, if the gravitational pull of the moon can affect the oceans, might it not also affect the liquid in and around the brain, and the brain itself which is really quite jelly-like? Perhaps someone some day will explain to me exactly what gravity is.

Methane

Huge amounts of methane lie just below the Arctic sea. Melting of seabed ice means that there could be a gigantic smelly belch any time soon. That would bring global warming forward by over 30 years and change the face of the planet: sea levels, climate zones, malaria risk areas … a long list. Human activity might have nothing to do with it: the leakage of methane from this area is nothing new and could have been going on since the end of the last ice age.

So what?

Yellowstone

The earth does not revolve around you or me. In time-terms, the ice age is but yesterday. It will come again. The earth will do what the earth has to do, and we can not stop it, even if that means a gigantic arctic fart next month, or a catastrophic eruption of the Yellowstone caldera. Microbes will do what microbes have to do, and we can not stop them, even if that means MRSA and/or bird flu epidemics decimate the human population next year. We are not in control. Not one of us. The sooner each one of us comes to terms with this, the better. Actually, it’s liberating, for it means that there’s no point fretting about the future so we might just as well work with the here-and-now–which is what eternal means anyway: out of time, in the moment.

Each one of us is no more than a collection of memories, feelings, and illusions—or more likely delusions—about ourselves. If we keep inflating our balloons, at some point they will burst. If we recognize our own powerlessness and frailty, we are not subject to illusions about them, or about the pride that causes us to think ourselves better than others. Ego-self is illusion. St Paul calls it flesh. Letting go of it is what the crucifixion is about. To love my life is to lose it—the self-centred ego, the me, me, me. Losing this means stepping into the freedom of resurrection. Liberation comes phoenix-like after destruction. This is the truth of all religions worthy of the name. We can rise only if we have fallen.

It’s been said that the principal job of the priest is to prepare people for death. So here you are, boys and girls: sooner or later you’re gonna be dead. All your self, your hurts, your trophies, your notions, your targets, your money in the bank … none of it matters. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. Meaningless. It doesn’t matter how big your grave is, how well-tended it is, how often it’s visited, or how large is the plaque erected in your memory.

Reading about science reminds me that, as I pointed out here, we are creatures of this earth. No more, no less. We’re in partnership with the cosmos, not opposition to it. So work with what you’ve got and enjoy it while it lasts. And when it goes, work with something else.

Our ways

Posted on 25/07/2013 by Rambling Rector

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

Following a letter I wrote to the Church of Ireland Gazette a few weeks ago, which was a shortened version of this, a retired bishop responded in that worthy publication by intimating that as a recent English import I should not presume to express my views because I do not know what he called ‘our ways’.

Since then, that same publication printed a story in which the Church of Ireland rejected President Obama’s description of education in Northern Ireland as ‘segregated’, particularly since that word had resonances with apartheid in South Africa. Indeed it does.

It’s people’s perceptions that we have to deal with, and until we do, facts are almost irrelevant. If President Obama perceives education in NI as segregated, then presumably others do too, and simply denying those perceptions is not a realistic strategy. (If the Laois Nationalist is to be believed, funeral care in this town might soon be segregated too.)

If I want a fresh opinion, I will seek it from a critical friend – someone who is not part of the club. Is it really the case that the Church of Ireland is so insecure that it responds to such critical friends by belittling them? The parable of the good Samaritan tells us, amongst other things, that we do well to accept all help, no matter whence it cometh.

Perhaps I am indeed as yet unfit to serve in the Church of Ireland. How long will it be before I have absorbed enough of what the retired bishop, of whom I yield to no-one in my admiration, refers to as ‘our ways’ to be allowed to express my views? Until then I shall remain silent. On the other hand, when I see in the news what ‘our ways’ have been responsible for, perhaps I shan’t.

The road to glory?

Posted on 19/07/2013 by Rambling Rector

A twinge of guilt still hangs over one Christmas in the early 1960s. It had been decided that I was going to be a doctor, so one of the presents was a plastic model of a person you could take to bits and put together again, thus learning about the structure of the body. And I never even opened it. I knew it had been expensive, hence the guilt. Before long, in the gloriously impressionable early teenage years, my heart was seduced by music and architecture. Glamour of a sort. The great awakening. The plastic human was shoved to the back of the cupboard.

The hope of Cambridge (never Oxford) enabled me to imagine that I could work in one world but live in another. This is the story of Magnus Pym, A Perfect Spy, but then we’re all spies one way or another. When I was 11, I chose Latin for Cambridge entrance, only to find after a year that Cambridge dropped the Latin requirement. I went through secondary school in a fug really. Music after school was the consolation for what went on in it. I still can’t see why I had to learn about Bessemer converters. I liked O-level biology though. Zoological classification was interesting, seeing patterns in the animal kingdom. A-level was a different kettle of fish, ho ho. The school was one of those chosen to try out the new Nuffield A-level syllabus. Why did we have to see for ourselves? Why did we have to reinvent the wheel? Why did we have demonstrate the bleeding obvious? Why not just tell me? I’ll believe you. Then we can get on with interesting speculative stuff and think about ‘so what?’ Nuffield biology had as high an opinion of me as I did of it, for my A level Biology result was an E – a scraped pass.

First memories of Cambridge days were not dead bodies in the dissection room, but the lectures from the Professor of Anatomy, Richard Harrison, in which he told us about primates (apes not archbishops), the group to which we humans belong. I was entranced by tarsiers, lemurs and so on, and how we were like them. I enjoyed embryology, hearing that our nine months of intrauterine development could, at a pinch, be seen as something like a kind-of speeded-up evolution—ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Fascinating stuff that has stayed with me and continues to intrigue: the evolution of reproduction.

Max, ten years before I knew him

The Senior Tutor of the Cambridge College I was at was himself an anatomist, Dr Max Bull. This was in the late 60s and early 70s. Men only, gates closed at 11 pm, permission needed to be away from College for even one night, dons regarded by statute in loco parentis. Max had a tough time as Senior Tutor in those days with student unrest, revolutionaries, riots and the like. They say if you can remember the 1960s you weren’t there. I wasn’t there. I suppose I became an anatomist because of Max: ‘if that’s what an anatomist is, and if that’s what an anatomist does, then I’ll be an anatomist’. In about 1974 Susan and I went to see him to ask his advice. He counselled against a career in anatomy. ‘You’ll never earn much.’ He was right. ‘You’ll always be looked down on by other medics.’ He was right. ‘It’s publish or perish out there; you’ll never get anywhere if you are like me, only interested in teaching.’ He was almost right: as one of my former colleagues in Dublin said to me, ‘the only reason you came to Dublin was because you’d never have made professor in England.’ Like all good advice, Max’s was not taken. He taught generations of Cambridge students, and was, with Dr Gordon Wright, a truly memorable teacher. Another anatomist memorable for other reasons was Dr Michael Message. His contributions to the anatomy course were lectures on statistics. No, I don’t see the connexion either. Here’s a story about him and me.

Picture the scene. First year anatomy viva voce exams, summer 1970. It’s customary for students to dress up for oral examinations: suit, tie, polished shoes etc. But nobody told me that, so here’s this still rather naïve state school boy from rural Cumberland in polo neck and grubby jumper waiting with the suited sophisticates who knew the form. We hope we will be sent to anyone but Dr Message. ‘Mr Monkhouse to Dr Message’. In I go. He passes me a fetal skull and asks me a few questions about how the skull forms and grows. Then he hands me wet specimen dripping with preservative, a triangular shaped wedge of meat on top of a chestnut, with a number of tubes attached.

‘Tell me, Monkhouse, what do you make of this?’
Silence.
‘Come on, come on, haven’t got all day.’
‘Well, Dr Message I don’t know, but it looks a bit like a heart, though if it is it’s not human.’
Dr Message rolls his eyes heavenwards.
‘Oh, come on, come on. Surely you can do better than that.’
More silence.
‘Well, Monkhouse, if I tell you these tubes here (pointing to two of them) develop from the mesonephric ducts, what can you say then?’
‘Well Dr Message’ says I with a broad smile (Oh God, no, not a smile, anything but a smile), ‘I can tell you it’s not a heart.’ Then I chuckled.

That was the end of that. The thing was a bladder (the triangular wedge) and prostate (the chestnut) and the tubes derived from the mesonephric ducts were the ducts that carry sperm from testes to penis through the prostate. The other two tubes were the ureters carrying urine from kidney to bladder. I was right of course: it wasn’t a heart.

Talk of prostate reminds me that I must take a break.

The happiest days of your life?

Posted on 19/07/2013 by Rambling Rector

Langwathby School as it used to be

Is there any reason why I must eat all my dinner? Why am I having school dinners anyway? The house is five minutes’ walk from school. Here am I, kept in just because I won’t eat pudding. Food comes in metal containers from some witches’ cauldron in Penrith. ‘Irish’ stew is tolerable if you leave the gristle on the side, and I like winter salad and pease pudding. I like salty stuff more than sweet. My babyish response to ‘what do you want to eat?’ always was ‘fish else eggs’. Definitely not sweets.

At the top of the ‘awful’ list are tapioca, semolina and rice pudding. Different sized lumps of rubbery snot in grey slime with a tiny gobbet of red jam that tastes of nothing. I refuse, day after day, week after week, kept in until the bell goes. These become happy times when I’m tall enough to reach the books on the shelf. Into my own little world I go.

The infant class was run by Mrs Green. Or maybe Miss. What’s the point of pretending to be a tree with branches waving in the autumn wind? Or to be an animal coming out of hibernation? Music and movement. Music and resentment. When I started at school, the Headmistress was Miss Taylor. The seniors said she had a cat-o-nine-tails, and used it. She took the over 11s—this was before the days of universal secondary education, and if you didn’t pass the 11-plus for the Grammar School, you stayed at the village school for two more years, out you go. She retired a year or two later. After a few years she returned to the village. The poor woman didn’t stay long. Instead of beating naughtiness out, the cat-o-nine-tails drove rage into former pupils, now her neighbours. She was followed by Miss Bean. No more cruel regime.

For most of my time at Langwathby school, up by the railway station, trains steamed past to and from Glasgow and Edinburgh, Thames-Clyde and Thames-Forth expresses. I was in Miss Metcalfe’s class. It was a shock to discover that she lived in the neighbouring village. I assumed that schoolteachers lived in specially exalted Emerald cities, and certainly not in a farmhouse in Great Salkeld with mum and dad. Every autumn she would tell us about her summer holidays, one in particular by ferry to Bremerhaven and Bremen so we heard about the Hanseatic league.

The school was bursting because of the baby boom, and with the post-war lack of money, Cumberland Education Committee (motto on the front of exercise books: Perfero) rented the Methodist Sunday School as a classroom. Assembly was held in the main school. On most days Headmistress Miss Bean, who became Mrs Byers, said a prayer that entranced this boy in short pants: ‘defend us in the same’, ‘fall into … neither run into’, ‘ordered by thy governance … always that is righteous’. Here was beauty, etched thenceforth on his psyche. The awakenings of delight. He’d never heard language like it before.

After assembly our lot trooped the 50 yards or so down the hill and across the road to chapel. Miss Winifred Metcalfe had a lot of us to look after, and managed by having two or three blackboards at the front, the different age ranges sat behind them as appropriate. On Mondays we had Rhythm and Melody or Singing Together alternate weeks on the radio ‘with Mr William Appleby’. ‘The harp that once through Tara’s halls’ made a wistful impression. ‘Wi a hundred pipers’ was good because it mentioned Carlisle. Our metropolis was famous, never mind that it was only because the wicked Scots laid it waste time after time. No wonder Hadrian built his wall. PT was occasional, thankfully. Humiliation time for fat Stanley, always the last to be picked, though I did quite like playing with ‘the apparatus’.

Nature walks were sporadic and always the same. Crocodile down the Culgaith road, turn right after Stratheden down to the river, then I can’t remember much more. Me and my best friend (as I would have said) John lived in houses with land that went down to the river, so maybe that was nowt special. Anyway, I couldn’t see that well—something that wasn’t noticed till I was about eight. On holiday in Gourock, I was unable to see things that it was felt I ought to be able to see. Ships to be precise. So maybe my lack of recollections about nature walks can be put down to not seeing things.

Thursday afternoon was handicraft—it had to be endured. Raffia, newspaper and glue, felt shapes – aaaargh. I liked printing and drawing with Miss Metcalfe’s Flo-Master pen, and the smell of the ink. Friday afternoons was story time. Winnie read to us novels by Rosemary Sutcliff, The Wind in the Willows, and the deeply subversive The Children who lived in a barn. I liked stories about people, but didn’t care for Sutcliff’s battles and standards and legions. I think we were supposed to like it because the Roman Wall was near. With Fell Farm Holiday and Fell Farm Christmas it became apparent that some children did exciting things on their own, and The Family from One End Street opened a new world: the warmth of a big family in a small house.

Winnie was a good teacher. She had standards. She sometimes lost her temper with the 10 and 11-year old bags of hormones. But she was loved. In the 1960s she married and moved to Penrith. The last time I saw her was a few months before she died. I was still at school I think. The hormones got to her again, I fear: a relatively late first pregnancy ‘provoked’ aggressive breast cancer. I could have gone to her funeral, but didn’t. I wish I had.