A Sliver of Ice

Graham Greene once said that every writer must have ‘a sliver of ice’ in their heart. He was noticing—and being appalled by—his own capacity for detached observation of other people’s grief even while offering them sympathy. But we writers are a cunning pack. We have co-opted this saying to excuse all manner of horrible behaviour on the grounds that we are artists. I give myself permission to ransack your misery for copy. Of course I do! I have a sliver of ice in my heart! You surely don’t expect me to be a nice person. Niceness is for the untalented. I’m far too busy working on my imaginary world to have anything left over for good behaviour in the real one.

Well, I’m certainly far too busy writing my novel to write my blog, anyway. A puzzling utterance to normal people, but immediately transparent to fellow novelists, who are thinking, ‘Aha, she’s blocked.’ There are writers, rather tiresome ones if you want my opinion (I assume you do, or you wouldn’t be here), who believe there’s no such thing as writer’s block, just lazy writers. After all, they chortle, you don’t hear about plumbers with plumber’s block, do you? Which begs the question, have they never had plumbers in? Do they not know from experience that a plumber may start work on your bathroom, then go away for three months leaving you with a gaping hole in the floor and half a bidet because ‘they are waiting for the tiles to arrive’?

Plumbers get blocked all right. They get blocked for similar reasons to writers: if they don’t have the right stuff to work with. If they realise they’ve put the taps on backwards. If they drill through the hot water pipe. If they paint themselves into a corner part-way through an immensely complex not to say baroque metaphor and… Ah, sod it.

There are simply times when you need to leave alone. Wait for the hand-painted Spanish tiles to arrive. For the plaster to dry out. And in the meantime, get on with other odd jobs. Like posting a blog.

Spatial Awareness

This cartoon is by my son. I don't know where he gets his ideas from. It has nothing to do with this post, but it makes a change from last week's random meteriological puzzle. Or indeed, gynaecological puzzle, which is what my spell check is suggesting.

Anyway. I was reading recently that men aren’t from Mars at all, neither are women from Venus. The physiological differences between the male and female brain at birth are tiny. It’s nurture, not nature which dictates that women back into gateposts and men don’t understand cushions. Cushions, the whole concept of cushions, what they are for, why women clog up sofas with the things, so that you have to fling about fifteen aside before you can locate enough sofa to sit on.

Whether it's down to nature or nurture, there are one or two of the old stereotypes I conform to. The gatepost thing, the cushion thing. The whole lack of spatial awareness thing. The other day our newly-appointed hermaphrodite Director of Music, which is to say, a husband-and-wife team Director of Music, showed me round the directorial house. I used to get lost here in the chancellery, but the chancellery is a doddle in comparison. At one point in my tour—which led up and down narrow flights of stairs to bits of the puzzle which never joined up—said ‘I have no idea where I am. I have zero spatial awareness.’

This led to a fascinating discussion about how brains work. Well, it led to me holding forth on my specialist subject area, me, and how my brian works. (It partly works by being endlessly amused by typos, such as that one. I don’t in fact have a Brian at the moment, nor am I recruiting.) My brain, I told the directorship, (who were too polite to yawn in my face, though they did turn the TV on and watch a very tedious programme about Anglo-Saxon artefacts) my brain does not do frameworks. It can only arrive at over-all schemes by the organic accumulation of details. I cannot read a book and tell you what it’s about, what the argument is. Though I can usually remember some interesting and significant facts. Like, there’s a cat on the cover.

The male bit of the Director asked how I plot my novels if I can’t do frameworks. ‘They grow organically from one central scene, or situation,’ I told him. ‘And then it’s rather like planning a journey. You know where you are setting out from and where you hope to arrive, but you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen along the way.’ ‘They are using 17th century music to illustrate Norman architecture,’ he replied, as the TV camera panned down the nave of Durham cathedral.

I didn’t get round to explaining that finishing a novel is like trying to choreograph tortoises. Or like cooking a banquet. It’s all in the timing. Everything has to be ready at the same moment. You don’t want to end up with raw chicken and soggy veg. This rambling is by way of an explanation for my lack of posts this week. I’m busy with the tortoises.

Hymn and Herself

This is a photo of an upside down rainbow I saw on holiday in Brittany. It has nothing to do with this post, apart from it being loosely speaking baffling. If you can explain it, leave a comment.

My real subject of bafflement is hymns. I grew up in a household with no TV. It was also a chapel-going household. One of the legacies of this is that I know hymns the way most normal people know pop music. Just as people mishear the lyrics of songs played on the radio (cf Hot Gossip’s famous ‘I lost my heart to a draught excluder’) so my sisters and I misunderstood the words of hymns. I remember being puzzled for years by the Advent hymn ‘On Jordan’s banks the Baptist’s cry’. Being a Baptist myself, I couldn’t help picturing the entire congregation lined up on the banks of the Jordan sobbing our hearts out. Why? Why just the Baptists? Because the Anglicans hadn’t repented, clearly.

One Christmas my youngest sister was overheard singing ‘Hairy Demption’s happy dawn’ instead of ‘Hail, Redemption’s happy dawn’. My father asked her what she thought a hairy demption was. She had no idea. But frankly, so much of your childhood is full of bizarre facts told you by adults, why would a hairy demption be any less plausible than the earth spinning like a roundabout, or chewing gum wrapping itself round your lungs if you swallow it? We were also baffled by the line in ‘God rest ye merry gentlemen’ which seemed to refer to ‘the witch his mother Mary’. But the best mishearing of all was a little boy in our Sunday School who thought the old song ‘I will make you fishers of men’ was ‘I will make you vicious old men’.

Of course, now I am an adult I have put away childish things. I no longer misunderstand hymns. Well, only on purpose. I’m always amused by the line in the hymn ‘And now, O Father, mindful of the love’, which talks about ‘this food’ (the Blessed Sacrament) ‘so awful and so sweet.’ Like baklava, maybe. Or indeed fudge, such as I have on my desk now—Morrison’s The Best All Butter Fudge, ‘made to an authentic recipe for a rich, melt in the mouth flavour.’ They mean a rich melt in the mouth texture, really, don’t they? There is no such taste as ‘melt-in-the-mouth.’ And in any case, if it didn’t melt in the mouth, it wouldn’t be fudge, it would be chewing gum, or pumice stone. I mention that not at random, but because my youngest sister (she of the hairy demptions) once did attempt to eat a pumice stone. We found the tooth marks.

I have strayed rather from my subject. Anglican hymns are not the same as Baptist hymns, by the way. Baptists do not sing saccharine hymns about the Blessed Sacrament, such as the cathedral favourite ‘Sweet sacrament divine’. They reserve such sentiments for the Lord Jesus. And they certainly don’t sing hymns to the Virgin Mary. In fact, most Evangelicals balk at this, so a merry time was had by them if they strayed into any of the cathedrals of our land last Sunday, as it was the Feast of the (Massive) Assumption. I had my internal Geiger counter switched on in all the hymns, scanning for Papism. Don’t get wrong, some of my best friends are Papists. And some of their best friends are narrow minded Evangelical bigots, obviously. Like me.

Never Swallow Flies

There is just the first hint of autumn in the air. Or if not autumn, precisely, then a sense that summer has peaked and is now on the lazy downward slope. Maybe it was the handful of yellow leaves falling from the lime trees on the Close as I set out on my run; or that certain angle of light that betrays the sun is a little lower in the sky.

Not a bad run, today, although I swallowed a fly in Beacon Park. Flies are a constant hazard for runners. What are your options? Run with your mouth closed? Impossible. Run with clenched teeth? (I do that up steep hills.) Maybe the answer is to keep your eyes peeled for insects and shut your mouth before you plunge into a cloud of midges. But you can’t watch the air and scan for dog crap. Or dogs. Small dogs are a hazard too. You really don’t want to tread on a miniature poodle. It could take several hundred yards to dislodge it from your shoe. You might as well go out running in those amusing animal slippers you see in the shops around Christmas, the ones that look as though you’ve decided to keep your feet warm by burying them in the entrails of a small mammal.

But back to flies. Maybe I should just man up (as the young say) and swallow the fly. After all, it won’t kill me. Unless, like the old woman, I seek to remedy it by eating a spider, and so on, up the food chain, until I foolishly swallow a horse. Which would be fatal. Of course. Instead I ran the next fifty yards hawking and gobbing in a blokish way, so I suppose I sort of did man up.

And from flies it is but a short step to writing novels. Sometimes I feel like a blue bottle at a window. I can see the garden out there that I’m trying to get to. I have a story in my head I want to tell. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again! Maybe I’m doing it wrong? That has to be the way! Look, there, there! I can see it—trees, flowers, fresh air. Maybe if I come at it from a different angle? Maybe my technique is wrong? What if I take a longer run-up? Aim higher? Lower? More gently?

People are always asking writers ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ Ideas are not the problem. Ideas are ten a penny. Open your newspaper. Look around your friends and neighbours. Ransack your experience. Beg, steal or borrow. The problem is how to cast your idea in the right form. The material is there, but how to tell the tale—that’s the question. You’d think you could come up with a cracking story, and just tell it. But no. I can spend years circling round Planet Novel looking for a place to land.

But then, miraculously, one day when you gear up for another grim session of window-bumping—and you’re through. In the garden. Woo hoo! What’s the secret? I have no idea.

'Woe to the Bloody City of Lichfield!'

These are the words of George Fox, founder of the Quakers, rather than my own feelings on returning home from holiday in Brittany. According to his Journal, Fox visited Lichfield in 1651. ‘I lifted up my head and I espied three steeplehouse spires. They struck at my life and I asked Friends what they were, and they said, Lichfield.’ This account puzzles me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Fox was pretty much a local lad, hailing from Fenny Drayton, only twenty odd miles down the road. Surely he knew the cathedral when he saw it? Secondly, in 1651 the tallest of the cathedral’s three spires was a mere stump, courtesy of Cromwell’s soldiers. But Fox was writing his Journal retrospectively, many years after the events.

When Fox arrived in Lichfield, barefoot (having left his shoes in the care of some astonished shepherds a mile outside the city), the word of the Lord came to him and told him to cry ‘Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield!’. He had a vision of the marketplace flowing with blood. It was market day, and Fox walked up and down prophesying ‘and no one touched me nor laid hands on me.’ This shows the locals up in a good light, considering Fox got much rougher treatment in places for far less provocation.

Fox himself was puzzled by the experience. ‘I considered why I should go and cry against that city and call it a bloody city; for though the Parliament had the minster [i.e. cathedral] and the King another while, and much blood had been shed in the town, yet that could not be charged upon the town.’ In the end he decided that the vision concerned the ‘thousand martyrs in Lichfield in the Emperor Diocletian’s time. And so I must go in my stockings through the channel of their blood in their market place. So I might raise up the blood of those martyrs that had been shed and lay cold in their streets, which had been shed above a thousand years before.’

So there you have it—the Bloody City of Lichfield. The first Quakers were not pacifist mystics silently contemplating the Inner Light which dwells in every human being. They were Bible-thumping revivalists. Theirs was a real End of the World prophetic message. I think Fox would have been surprised to learn that Lichfield cathedral (third spire rebuilt) was destined still to be a functioning place of worship in 2010. He might also be astonished if he wandered into a modern Quaker Meeting House, mind you.

What is the difference between a prebend and a prebendary?

You can’t wash your hands in a prebendary. I got that out of a Christmas cracker. It was an Anglican cracker. It had a paper mitre in it and a little plastic novelty tea urn. According to my dictionary, a prebend is either a) the stipend assigned by a cathedral to a canon or member of the chapter or b) the land, tithe or other source of such a stipend.

The word ‘stipend’ in this context means ‘a fixed or regular amount paid as to a clergyman, of completely imaginary money.’ A prebendary is the recipient of such an imaginary stipend. In some cathedrals there are 'honorary canons'. Same thing. It is an honorary post awarded to long standing clergy of the diocese for being a good egg. Or eggess, in these modern days of ours.

Lichfield cathedral has many prebends. These are named after the various places in Staffordshire where the prebend lands were once situated. Places like 'Gaia Major' (pronounced, rather thrillingly, gayer major, and source of many quip.) Each prebend has its own prebendal stall in the cathedral in the choir chancel. This is where the prebendaries sit. The Prebendary of Curborough sits in the Curborough Stall, for example. These rights are fiercely guarded. I’ve learnt that proper etiquette and formal ritual is hugely important in cathedral life. Prebendaries must each sit in their own designated stall.

The only exception is the stall of the Prebendary of Freeford, which is next to the chancellor’s stall. The Freeford Stall is reserved for Mrs Chancellor (as I am known around the Close), and she asserts her ancient historic right to punch anyone who tries to sit there in evensong. Unless of course, the Prebendary of Freeford turns up, in which case he may assert his right to punch the chancellor’s wife. He in turn will immediately be punched by the chancellor.

After this, the precentor, in his role as first canon of the cathedral, may if he chooses, punch the chancellor. Obviously, the dean may punch anyone he feels like punching, up to and including the bishop—unless they stray outside the cathedral precincts, in which case the bishop’s own punching rights come into force and he may punch the dean. In fact the bishop of Lichfield may punch anyone anywhere within the boundaries of the Lichfield diocese, apart from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, or the queen. Finally, every few years the leaders of entire Anglican Communion world-wide gather at the Lambeth Conference for a mass punch-up. I hope this is helpful in clarifying Anglican protocol.

To be honest, I just made all that up. I don’t go around punching people. I prefer to strangle them. But that’s just me, I’m a judo player. I actually have to be quite careful to keep judo and the cathedral in separate mental compartments. There is a lot of bowing in the cathedral, just as there is in martial arts. If someone bows at you on the judo mat, it’s a signal that they are about to attack you. This is not the case when people bow in the cathedral. In the cathedral they generally attack without warning. That is the Anglican way.

The Close is Foreign Country...

...they do things differently there. They speak a foreign language. Even those fluent in Anglican-speak need to get their ear in to understand the local dialect of a Cathedral Close. Firstly there are the bits of technical jargon, often abbreviated to make them even more impenetrable to the outsider. ‘Mag & nunc’, ‘can and dec’, ‘volly’.

Before I go any further, a little disclaimer: I am naught but an ignorant Nonconformist in origins, daughter of the Baptist Manse. It is possible that one or two errors may creep in to this blog. I have already been informed that it would have been the Royalists trying to climb into my back garden via the moat, as the Parliamentarians mainly attacked from the south. Yes, yes. I'm a novelist, not a historian. AN historian, I should say, to head off any more nit-pickers. Pedants seem to thrive in the eccentric conditions of your typical Cathedral Close. They don't watch 'Doctor Who', round here, they watch 'Doctor Whom'. I get a bit fed up with pedanticism, to be honest. (Ooh, nearly got you.)

The terms mentioned above are concerned with the Choral Foundation (music stuff), and mean ‘Magnificat and nunc dimittis’ (the two anthems sung at Choral Evensong, i.e. ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’ and ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace’.) ‘Can and dec’ refer to the two opposite sides of the choir aisle, and by extension, the two halves of the choir who sit facing across the chancel (top bit nearest high altar). This is a historic arrangement which enables the lay clerks (choir men) to smirk at each other when the Psalm for the evening contains the verse ‘Neither doth he delight in any man’s legs.’

‘Can’ is the precentor’s side (the precentor being the canon in charge of music stuff) and ‘dec’ the dean’s side (the dean being the one in charge of everything). There is some Latin explanation for can and dec, but you’ll have to google it. (It will ask if you mean Ant and Dec.) If I'm not careful I will end up with parentheses within parentheses, like Russian nesting dolls, and you will get bored and start looking at porn instead. I daresay you can buy an iPhone cathedral phrasebook app to help you navigate your way round the linguistic labyrinth.

A ‘volly’ is an organ ‘voluntary’ played at the close of a service; a strange term my sons think, as it is involuntary from their perspective. ‘I have wasted hours of my life waiting for the voluntary to end,’ lamented my younger son at the end of one (long) piece. He went on to compose his own volly on his computer software, capturing perfectly the tedium and discord of the French style, and the well-known 'False Dawn Syndrome', in which the piece appears to end several times… but no, another movement. This work came to an abrupt stop with the sound of a gun-shot, followed by a final thunderous discord as the organist slumped dead on the keyboard. Or manual, I should say. My sons have not learnt to love the Cathedral Choral Tradition in all the four years we have lived on the Close. But then, other residents of the Close have perhaps not learnt to love their drumming and electric guitars, so fair dinkum.