A Soft Christmas

Pretty gifts! Bee ear-rings and perfume and a bird feeder, a book of psychedelic art, a full Mtdna test kit... It was a sweet easy day.

I wish I could have contacted Mum but her phone is doing whatever her phone does. I tried a few times and will try again today.

The only way I can guarantee her happy Christmas is to spend it with her. I want to, because I won't have he forever, but this was about staying home with R for the first Christmas in our new house, to help make the place feel loved and lived in. I hope to see her in the Spring.

Saw a moment of Mary Queen of Scots. Still can't understand why the film annoys me so much. I switched on and off, just as Rizzio is being murdered, changed channels, tried again a bit later, in a scene full of fabric, where the Stewart coolly informs the Tudor of her greater right to the English throne... Well, I daresay this might have happened if the former was taught diplomacy by Christopher Walken turning up and demanding more cowbell, but I just had to switch it off. I am never going to be able to bear this film. I have no problems with Mary being depicted as the 'normal' woman albeit with regal dignity and beauty, because she probably was; Elizabeth was the one who grew up in the shadow of a morbid pathology. But I can't stand all that muslin floating around, plus the inevitable pitting of one woman against another in terms of beauty, wedlock, and childbirth. It mattered a lot at the time, I guess, but to me this depiction of it is a bit like that Britney/Madonna thing Me Against The Music. All it needed was bamboo and a bowler hat. And I'd still have hated it.

Last week of the year, last week of the decade. There is much to think about. But for now, yesterday's softness is still with me, and very little is going to be happening in this house today. It's all good.

Thoughts that may lead nowhere

A friend of mine wrote a beautiful piece on Mary as a revolutionary force.
https://radicalhoneybee.blogspot.com/2019/12/mary-unbound-fourth-sunday-in-advent.html?m=1&fbclid=IwAR0P98_qioxObJg9Vaa4jpQe1ey2NoiARAEIhfXRk18mpEZXu_AhyPkdUtw

I know my friend's spiritual background entailed training as a Priestess of Avalon in Glastonbury. Leaving that order, she seems to have found Christianity in a form I much admire, weaving folk traditions and 'hedgerow saints' into the tapestry of it. It's beautiful and profound, even though I detect much heartache behind it... I don't think her life, her being, is at all easy. Often she seems to be stretching hard to find a kernal of something sweet. I can feel the effort. She has been accused of being somewhat twee in her approach, but it leads to a kind of Christianity that is much more radical than the paganism we are greeted with now, which at its core often has middle English values spiced with lots of 60s permissiveness. Sex comes and goes, oo-er missus, but the poor are with you always... And modern paganism has little to do with that basic hardship, that need to survive.

When Christianity is radical it is basically communist in outlook; give poor people food, clothes, shelter, help. Give lots. If everyone does this when they can, no-one goes without when they can't.

Don't tell me we ever took this entirely on board. It got turned around into a kind of feudal fatalism.
Admittedly, the Church created the skeleton of a welfare state hundreds of years before the state existed, and that meant co-operating with the wealthy seeking heaven. I can see how that worked for a while, I can see the trajectory... And the flaws are as obvious as the benefits.

Speaking as a person who grew up fluctuating wildly between states of wealth and poverty, I know that the poor can be every bit as stupid as the rich, the difference is that they have less opportunity to change it. The frustrating thing is when they vote to make things worse. That's the point when I throw my hands in the air and say Have it your own way! Knock yourselves out!

And that is kind of where I am. There has been a little encouragement for me to go into politics, and I really appreciate it, but have decided against it for changing reasons. I used to think that I just couldn't do it, what with lifelong dyspraxia etc, but we see that lack of ability or even care is not necessary. Despite all the proof to the contrary, my heart tells me that a proper public servant should love the people, and I am not sure I do, or at least, my connection is very tenuous. The values I cherish don't matter at all in England, as far as I can see, and until and unless they do, there are other things to do with my time.

Of course Scotland is very different. I'll put my energy into environmental protections, ecological stuff, animal welfare. Time to join the Scottish Greens.