The Most Difficult Language in the World

Yesterday I went to my favourite hipster café and wrote about 180 words in Polish, mostly about Easter Sunday supper. I hadn't written anything in Polish in a while, and I don't want to get out of the habit. It was my practice to write gossipy letters to Polish Pretend Son, but as he hasn't sent me his new mailing address, I stopped. Writing emails in Polish is not much fun, as it entails a different keyboard. Meanwhile, I hope PPS is not living in a cardboard box. You can never tell with London. Friends go to live there and then are too proud to tell you that they are living in a hovel in Tower Hamlets, woken at dawn by the muezzin.

I find food an endless source of linguistic inspiration, so Polish Pretend Son has received an awful lot of menus. 

For one dinner party, a host cooked 'zupę (soup), pieczony udziec jagnięcy (roast leg of lamb) oraz "bread and butter" pudding czekoladowy ( chocolate bread and butter pudding)'.  

On Mothering Sunday, I ordered pasztet (paté), strzepiel z frytkami (seabass with french fries) and budyn (pudding). 

Yesterday I noted that for Easter I prepared 'żurek (Polish sour soup), udziec jagnięcy, groszek (peas), ziemniaki (potatoes), bułki wielkanocne (Easter buns, i.e. hot cross buns), i dwa ciasta (two cakes): baranka wielkanocnego (a three dimensional lamb cake) i Simnel Cake...tradycyjny brytyjski keks z marcepanem (a traditional British fruitcake with marzipan). 

While I was rewriting my scribbles into correctable form--for sometimes I get my Polish teacher to correct them in the break--a young barista came by to take away my coffee cup and tell me the café was closing for the evening. 

"Are you learning Polish?" he asked with interest.

"Yes," I said, gesturing to the dictionary, the verb book, the grammar and the notebook.

"I'm learning Bulgarian," said the poor young man with pride.

"Gosh!" I said with fellow feeling. "Bulgarian!"

"I can read Cyrillic now," said the fellow. "It uses Cyrillic."

"How long have you been studying Bulgarian?"

"A few months. My girlfriend is Bulgarian, and we're going there in a few months. Hopefully I'll be able to speak it by then."

"Gosh," I said, silently pondering my almost four years of toil. "Good luck!"

Fifteen minutes later, I told this tale to the classmate already in the new classroom (for Easter term has just begun) with some amusement. But he reflected that Bulgarian is simpler than Polish, for Polish has more cases and besides, everyone says that Polish is the hardest language in the world. But even as he said that, he looked dubious. I looked dubious, too. We are not convinced that Polish really is the most difficult language in the world.

"Poles love to say that Polish is the most difficult language in the world," I observed. "I think they're proud of the idea, so it's best just to agree."

My personal theory about squabbling with Poles is that unless you're willing to kill them, you have to just lose graciously and as soon as possible. Otto von Bismark said that they only way to deal with them is to beat them until they lose heart, which was a rotten Prussian thing to say. However, the big exception--I believe--is anything having to do with love of Poland, Polish or Polish culture. If you are determined to make the best pierogi in the world and a Pole tells you this is fundamentally impossible for a foreigner, go ahead and try to make the best pierogi in the world. As a frightfully stubborn people themselves, Poles in general admire perseverance if not out-and-out competition. Naturally loving Polish geography so much that you wish to take some away from Poles is not admired. 

For all I know, Polish is the hardest language in the world for a native English-speaker to learn, although I hear Arabic is a real headache, alongside Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. Polish is certainly harder to learn than swing-dancing. Plowing through Harry Potter i Komnata Tajemnic (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) is still very, very difficult, and reading is the easiest thing to do, followed by writing. This is why Polish class is so very important: a good teacher forces you to go and talk to other students in Polish. Ours forces us to  have little Polish conversations. As they are generally also about what we like and dislike, or about our daily or holiday activities, we quickly find things to say. For example, my favourite activity with my "partnerem"--as modernity has sadly added to the Polish language--note the obvious English origin of the word--can be expressed as follows:

Wolę lecieć do Rzymu z mężem i zjeść ogromny obiad w restauracji.

That most definitely shows my priorities in life and, meanwhile, finding the ć button, plus trying not to reverse Y and Z, has completely worn me out, so off I go to get on with the rest of the daz. 

Bitter Almonds

I was doing a particularly disgusting household task today (think botulism), and all of a sudden I remembered a "Seraphic Singles" reader I met a while ago. She used to read my blog because she had been good and sick of being Single, and what she wanted more than anything else in the world was to get married and have a baby.

Meanwhile, she had graduated from university and was working towards the relatively high-status and lucrative career her family expected of her. She enjoyed the challenge and did the work and eventually got a great job shortly before she married. Soon after becoming married, she got pregnant and when the baby was born she packed it in at the office. I forget if she was offered decent maternity leave or if she basically just had to go. I suspect the latter. It wasn't one of those professions that are oh-so-understanding when a woman has a baby.

Staying at home with the baby didn't seem so bad because  (A) she didn't want her baby raised by strangers at a day care and (B) her husband also had a well-paying job. Although it didn't take quite as much extra study as her career had entailed, it was very lucrative. It was also very high pressure; at least, he found it so. He got terrible migraines and when he came home he did nothing but watch TV and wonder aloud why the house was such a mess.

The house was such a mess because the baby was a difficult one and the New Mom had to work around the clock 24/7 to keep the baby happy, healthy and fed, sleeping when the baby was sleeping. And despite this, as the months dragged on, and the baby began to toddle about and to say a few words, the New Mom was mind-numbingly bored. And ashamed. Deeply, deeply, ashamed. All that education, all that overtime, and for what? Her mother and other female relations, she was sure, were looking down on her for "not working". She had been a working woman, commanding a good salary, racking up successes and praise, and what was she now? She was exhausted, run ragged by the baby, very worried about her husband, and somehow unable to even keep her house clean.

When I launched into a little theological speech about how motherhood is the most important and noble profession for a woman, the New Mom began to cry. So I stuck a sock in it except to say what I always say to weeping mothers of very young children, which is that if they need help around the house and their husbands are making that much money, then they should freaking hire household help. Once upon a time, well-educated women married to men in highly-paid  jobs ALWAYS had household help. ALWAYS. And the highly-paid men who didn't agree to pay for it were considered incredibly cheap and even cruel.

 I don't know if your fellow reader did get some household help although I hope so with all my heart. It wasn't even as if she wanted any time to herself, or even to try to get her self-respect back by going "back to work". My impression was that she wanted to be able to TAKE CARE OF HER HUSBAND as well as the baby, and she was finding it absolutely impossible. And having a clean house is part of caring for husbnads, since husbands seem to really, really need to have tidy houses even if they themselves are fundamentally incapable of wielding a sponge.

I thought I would throw that out there today in case I have been sounding too peppy about marriage lately. What all you girls who desperately want to get married must realize is that there is a lot of cleaning and brainless television in your future. It blows my mind that men (men not completely worn out from real wage-slavery, like mining, that is) used to leave the house after dinner and go out at night: to the pub, to the music hall, to the dance hall, to lectures, to political meetings, to the theatre, to the cinema. If they were fond of their wives, they would take their wives.

The television seems to have put an end to that for most men. There are a lot of men at swing-dancing, but I bet swing-dancing days will be over as soon as they can get women to share their beds and board---perhaps a nasty shock for the poor women who envisioned dancing together into the future. (The brave and besotted boys who come out to Polish class because they love their Polish sweethearts enough to want to speak to their relations are great and honourable exceptions to these observations.)

Anyway, Single, Engaged or Married, you should always contemplate the pretty sugar-coloured almonds that are such a feature in weddings nowadays. The sugar on the outside represents the sweetness of married life. But right in the middle is the slightly almond, sometimes still with its bitter skin. Whoever developed the sugar almonds at weddings tradition had a good grasp on reality. No two people living together can be completely contented with each other and their lot 100% of the time.

Very Quick Artsy Post

DANCE

I am just back from swing-dancing; I even got myself home from the bus stop, having forgotten to charge up my phone. Ohhhh, scary! But here I am, safe from whatever or whoever may haunt our woods. (I ran like the dickens.)

I paid £10, i.e. for both the beginners' and the improvers' classes, and stayed for the social dancing, which this week featured a live band. To my great joy, I discovered that I really am getting better. Thank goodness. Maybe one day the Really Good Male Leads will ask me to dance. (The Really Good Female Leads already do, bless them.)

I notice, however, that women ask the Really Good Male Leads to dance within seconds of the last dance ending. It will be a few months before I will feel that my own skills are good enough to risk that! Personally, I asked two beginners and one just-back-after-three-years type. And I was asked to dance by four or so leads myself, so that was very good. I think I danced as much as the average follower can expect!

ART

I bought a "How to Draw Animals" book for a very young friend today. My conscience besmote me, for we should all  start off by drawing what we see, not in a cartoony way. However, all the exercises are about copying the author's drawings, bit by bit, which strikes me as good training after all.

CUISINE

B.A. and I took another friend (older than the above) for a birthday lunch at an Edinburgh restaurant today. It was a very good one, the sort that marries French cuisine with locally sourced Scottish ingredients. I had home-cured salmon decorated with fennel fronds, blue flowers, wafer-thin toast and cubes of purple potato, followed by a mushroom and truffle oil risotto, studded with parmesan brittle. Quite heavenly

LITERATURE

I am quite pleased with myself, for I have written two ghost stories in three weeks, a vast improvement over my recent literary output.

They have nothing in common with Agatha Christie novels, but I mention AC again because of having read so many of her novels when I was ill: six or seven. What is really astonishing about the novels I read was that they were not at all formulaic.

Christie was, in her way, just as inventive as J.K. Rowling. And she really was a plot machine. Indeed, Christie wrote two plots per book: the plot she wants you to see, and the plot she reveals at the end. She must have turned almost everywhere she ever went into a setting for her novels: villages, boarding schools, hotels, trains, country homes--murders happen at them all.

And of course she froze all kinds of ancient British specimens, now generally extinct, in amber. Hysterical housemaids, professional dance-and-tennis instructors, Latin-spouting vicars, Indian officers (meaning white Englishmen who were in the British "Indian Army"), lazy old gardeners and ladies' dress shop owners. Where else do people come across such people nowadays, save in a Christie novel?  Meanwhile, I think it worth mentioning that Christie chose for her most prolific detectives two types rather despised during her lifetime: the never married, childless, elderly woman and the theatrical, boasting foreigner.

But one thing that Christie does NOT seem to mention in her books, unless I am very mistaken. Although she has a lot to say, in the 1960s and, I believe, 1970s, about Modern Youth and Terrorism, she doesn't describe foreign migration to the UK in any detail. Today one of the most frequent surnames in London is Patel (another is Khan), but you would never, ever get that from Christie's later works. A curious oversight.

Interestingly, although I gobbled as many Christie books as I could when I was 12, in my 20s, I decided I was tired of her "formulaic" stock of characters--the colonel, the mysterious foreigner, the bullying wife, the spirited ingenue, et alia--and set them aside. But now I am back among Christies' admirers, in part because she did such a very good job at what she set out to do. Even if I never publish another novel again (and I am sure I will), I hope I will be able to write as prolifically as she did.

Roots

Oh, what a thing it is to get into the papers.

Here is a story about one of the more respectable family incidents.

Are We Soljahs?

Benedict Ambrose, having been raised in Dundee, has no compunction about imitating accents for comedy routines during parties, and sometimes he even gets them right. My biggest complaint is that although he can correctly pronounce French, Italian, Polish and any other language with which I struggle, he never bothers to learn them. How annoying is that?

One of B.A.'s star turns is Cardinal Arinze, who was the Prefect of the Congregation of Divine Worship under Benedict XVI, and therefore a big Traditional Latin Mass hero.

(It is Traddy Tuesday, my day for comforting would-be converts whose attitude towards Sunday Mass is utter disappointment, so we are talking about Trad Stuff today.)

Apparently someone asked Cardinal Arinze about this new thing in the USA and Canada where communicants are expected to all stand up together, march to communion together and remain standing in their pews together until the entire collective has received communion, whereupon they can kneel down together and make a thanksgiving.  Or maybe it was just the old "Does everyone have to stand and receive the sacrament in their unconsecrated hands even though this was originally an indult  granted to sinful, wicked post-war Dutch/Belgian/German/French Bishops, or can we kneel and receive on the tongue as was clearly the norm everywhere else in the Latin Church until 1976?" question. I am not sure. When you're married to a Liturgy Nerd you often hear only half the story before.....zzzzzz....

At any rate, Cardinal Arinze's eyes bugged out of his head--at least in B.A.'s recreation of the event--and demanded, "Are we SOL-diers?" or--as B.A. has it--SOL-jahs?

Blind conformity to the collective may be what neurotic spirit-of-Vatican-II liturgists are after, but this does not have anything to do with Traditional Catholicism, let me tell you. Traditional Catholicism is wonderfully relaxed about how the laity pray during the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as long as we are QUIET (and, 75% of the time, silent), don't disturb other people and physically restrain our offspring from running up and down the aisles. Traditional Catholicism even goes easy on women who do not want to go to Mass for they have just given birth and want to take care of their young 24/7.  "Great!" says Traditional Catholicism. "You do that little thing! Come back when you can!"

One thing that never happens to you during a Traditional Latin Mass--unless your noisy/peripatetic offspring annoy Mr or Mrs Cranky-- is being bossed around. Okay, in some parishes, possibly people force books and papers on you in the name of hospitality. However, in my church this very rarely happens. You walk in, you pick up books and papers, you select your seat, you genuflect, you sit. Or kneel. A bell rings eventually to tell you to stand up. But no person, least of all a lay person, tells you to stand up, Nobody tells you to introduce yourself to your neighbour. Nobody tells you to turn to the Asperges/Vidi Aquam in the book. Nobody gives you orders at all.

About five minutes after the bell a priest sprinkles water on you. You can either cross yourself, or you can do nothing. You can sing along with the rest of the congregation for their obvious part in the singing, or you can stay silent. If you stay silent, you are very likely to hear something that may be new to you in such ecclesiastical surroundings--lay men singing. Actual men, actually singing, in actual Latin. As they think it is worth doing, they think it worth doing badly. However,maybe because they sing the same tune every week, they very rarely do sing it badly. And if they do, it doesn't matter. Unless they are in the schola, of course, in which case the smoke of Satan has entered the choir stalls.

Next the priest disappears into the sanctuary or into the sacristy to swap his Asperges cope for the Mass chasuble, and you can keep standing or sit or kneel and pray or read or think until Mass begins and all around you the congregation crunches to its knees. That's when you should crunch to your knees, too, or else you will draw attention to yourself, which is THE no-no at the Traditional Latin Mass. No-one, not even the priest, is supposed to draw attention to himself. All the attention is supposed to be where the priest is looking, which is either going to be the altar, the Blessed Sacrament or the Scriptures. If your eyes get tired, you can rest them on the back of the priest's pretty chasuble, which should have holy symbols on it to edify your subconscious.

Decades before the Deluge the Second Vatican Council threw parish liturgies into disarray, reformers got interested in helping Catholics pay more attention to the official prayers at Mass by way of missals. In the old days, you were expected to pray your own prayers during Mass, and there was apparently an interesting and fruitful method of praying the rosary in such a way that it "went along" with the different parts of the Mass. But not all Catholics were good at that and were easily distracted into thinking about grocery lists and sneezing livestock and the Sunday roast. Therefore, it was decided that they ought to have missals, so they could pray along with the priest, seeing what he was praying on one side in Latin and following the vernacular translation on the other. Most trads use these although I, personally, have heard an exasperated homily about how you can use them too much. All the sounds of flipping pages were apparently driving the homilist insane.

Interestingly, there was no one official missal. You could use any old missal, as long as it had a Nihil Obstat on it and you found it helpful and it wasn't too enormously out-of-date for practical use. (The 1962 Easter Triduum is rather different from the 1945, which is when my favourite missal was published.)  And thus there are a wide variety of missals at my church, and people only take an interest if someone shows their new one off at After-Mass Tea. Naturally in Edinburgh, an old onion-skinned beauty one picked up for 50 p ("Can you believe it?!") at a used bookshop is WAY more impressive than a gilt-edged newbie from Baronius Press, not that the Baronius Press one isn't very nice. It is.

Meanwhile, you get to personalize your missal by stuffing mass cards into it as your Trad friends die or have anniversaries. It is considered very mean to die or get ordained without giving all your friend mass cards to stuff into their missals. And they are worth the price, too. Every time one falls out of my missal, I remember to pray for the person before stuffing it back in.

Where was I? Your public responsibilities at Mass, such as they are, are carefully delineated in the missal, and are memorized by almost everyone around you too, so you can follow them (if not the missal) quite easily. They are mostly saying "Et cum spirituo" when the priest turns around and kindly asks that "Dominus vobiscum. If it is the practise of your community, e.g. trads in France, to stand, not kneel, during the Lord's Prayer, the priest will not get annoyed if you stand. He can't see you anyway. He's not talking to you. Really, the only way you can annoy the priest is to make a noise you should not be making. Coughing is okay, but saying "Amen" loudly at the end of the Lord's Prayer is a capital offense, and you really should know better if absolutely nobody else in the entire congregation says it with you, you stupid attention-seeking eccentric from hell.

Meanwhile you can follow in the Missal, or you can pray the rosary, or you can read along with the hymns and propers the Schola is singing. Whatever brings you most fully into communion with God and the Bride of Christ, the Church (Militant, Suffering and Triumphant). This is, after all, the point. To feel like a part of a great big tribe family you can go to a football game in the afternoon although in Scotland one is no longer allowed to scream sectarian abuse.*

Naturally you go to communion only if you are in a state of Grace and in a proper frame of mind to receive and you kneel along the altar rail (or in our church, on a designated kneeler) and you receive on the tongue. If you have a dicky knee, or some other ailment or condition that prevents you from kneeling, you stand in the aisle and look pathetically hopeful at the priest while keeping your hands clenched together, so he doesn't think you are some I-Have-The-Right-To-Take-The-Blessed-Sacrament-Into-My-Unconsecrated-Hands-and-Consume-It-Where-and-When-I-Want-You-Clericalist-Monster activist. (This gaze of exaggerated and dog-like humility is particularly important if you are over 55 but under 80 because everyone knows eucharistic rebels tend to be boring old hippies of a certain age.) When the priest approaches, open your mouth, slide your tongue out and glue the tip to just under your bottom lip. Freeze your tongue until the Host is on it, and then pull it back in, around the Host, and shut your mouth. Swallow.

When you return to your seat, you may sit, or you may kneel, or I suppose you may even stand, if that's how you pray silently best. Nobody wants to pay attention to you except the naughtiest of the altar servers. Everyone else is speaking to God and doing their best to pay attention to Him and giving Him the best homage of which they are capable. Some may be singing with the choir, inwardly or outwardly. Some may be reading one of the many great prayer of Saint Thomas Aquinas, or of Saint Bonaventure. Some may be taken up until the Seventh Heaven, but will never tell anyone else. It's really not any of our business, as long as they aren't disturbing anyone else and have prevented their children from doing so.

If you are on your knees, you can stay on them for quite a long time, and it is handy for when the priest blesses you, for that is when everyone around you not already on their own, will get on their own. Being terrible romantics, we prefer to kneel for blessings, just like in historical movies, plays, books, King Arthur, 19th century Polish paintings, etc. But then we get up for the Last Gospel, if we haven't run off to set up the After-Mass Tea.

Because, guess what? Not being soldiers extends even to when we leave Mass. Personally, I stay right to the end of the Postlude because I love organ music and I think staying to listen is a mark of respect to the organist. And I do my best to arrive before the Asperges/Vidi Aquam because I like to begin things at the beginning. But B.A. told me about of a practice called "Chalice Veils" which means that  ONLY time you absolutely, utterly, totally must be in church to fulfill your Sunday/Holy Day of Obligation is between the moment the priest takes the chalice veils off the chalice and when he puts it back on again, i.e. the Offertory to the Post-Communion.

Naturally, intentionally arriving late and staying only then for no seriously good reason would be very stingy-mingy of you. However, even then the priest wouldn't seriously care because he can't see you. As long as you leave quietly and don't disturb anyone else or step on the seeing eye dog, we're not going to say anything. You could be a doctor rushing off to an emergency. You could have an angry Protestant spouse who wants to be driven to the mountains before lunch. We have no idea, and it's none of our business. Still, if you didn't rush off, you could come to the parish hall for a cookie and a cup of tea. Or coffee. Your choice.

*One of the annoyances of being a Catholic in Scotland is that the vast majority of Catholic Scots think "Catholic" is an ethnic group and you show "loyalty" to your "race" not only by going to Mass from time to time but by supporting Celtic, Hibernian or any other football club that was started 150 years ago by some well-meaning priest. "If you were a Catholic, you would have understood [my hopes that Cardinal O'Brien be helped in living a chaste life]", quoth I  over Facebook to a 20 year old homosexual activist. "I am a Catholic you're a bigot" wrote the homosexual activist. Happy face happy face happy face. Heart heart heart.

Finding God's Will

God is not a micro-manager. In fact, I would not call God a manager at all. God is in all things, just being. Possibly He is also singing, and if we listen, we might hear Him. But maybe not.

There are many, many documents in which we can read about the Will of God. There are the Scriptures. There are the mystical testimonies of the saints. There are even private revelations. But there are no personal horoscopes for you, Suzy Q, 142 Dreaming Lane, Dreamsborough, CT, in which God says, "And on May 23, 2016, I want you to..."

If you don't read the Scriptures or even what Saint Augustine or some other great saint has to say about what he or she has discovered about the Will of God for his or her own life, then you can get pretty messed up worrying about the Will of God all the time. 

Meanwhile, if you don't even know what YOU want to do with your life, how are you supposed figure out the Will of an Omnipotent Being for your life? Do you know what the will of your parents is for your life? Have you ever even asked them? They, too, are the authors of your life, so asking them might be worth a shot.  

Naturally, you may already know. I spent my childhood doing a lot of things my mother was not allowed/able to do as a child and very much would have liked to have done. She made real financial sacrifices to make sure I did them. Her idea was that I should be "well-rounded." 

I did not actually trust in my mother's insistence that I be well-rounded, which is too bad. Had I been less resentful of my lot and more trusting of my mother's goal, I would have started saying "No" to the activities I really, really hated and proposed alternatives. If the goal was "well-rounded" than there must have been other ways to round me off. I am absolutely sure that my mother did not want me to look back on my childhood as almost unalloyed misery, divided between the horrors of elementary school and the horrors of planned activities I hated. Thank God for Brownies and Girl Guides, say I. 

When you are a child, your parents might as well be God, for they have all the money and all the power they don't give over to teachers, and if you say no to them, you are punished. But as obedient as they may have liked their children to be, they would have been disturbed if you spent your life waiting for them to tell you what to do. Of course, asking their opinions in important matters would be a different story. They like that although, depending on their generation, they might not like the feeling that you will hold them responsible for their advice, should it turn out to be bad. 

Still, since God put you under the authority of these people and their teachers, you might just hear His voice in the things they say. Either something will fill you full of joy and relief--which will be a big YES, LISTEN TO THEM--or it will make you feel rotten and hopeless--which will be a big NO, THAT'S NOT WHAT I ASK. God may allow others to make you feel rotten and hopeless--He gave them Free Will, after all--but that does not mean He wants you to go through life feeling rotten and hopeless. What a waste of a life that would be. 

God also put you under the authority of the state--says B.A., who is not an anarchist and says I should read what the Catholic Church actually teaches about the legitimate authority of the state--so it might be helpful to see what the state would like you to do, too.  If the state is crying out for doctors, and you are crazy about biology, then perhaps you should consider training as a doctor. And again, joy and relief versus rotten and hopeless are good clues as to what you should be doing. 

And then there is the authority of the Christian Church, which has a lot to say to young people, so it might be worth reading it. Maybe I should actually get around to reading this. It came out when I was fourteen, and sadly I simply didn't understand it. It made me feel rotten and hopeless, actually. But what this meant was that I needed catechetical materials for a fourteen year old, not diving into papal encyclicals without help. 

In our day and in our western civilizations, marriage is seen primarily as companionate, and it takes place after a falling in love.  Things "feel" right when we have fallen in love with them.  My brother fell in love with the piano when he was six, and with the computer when he was about thirteen. Piano and computer have shaped his successful and rather enviable life. Nobody had to force him to practice the piano; he didn't practice the piano to ward off punishment. He practiced because he loved it. He also learned computer programming because he loved that, too. And despite my mother's worries that my brother not be well-rounded (and grounding him off the computer if he fell behind in schoolwork), nobody ever thought God's will for my brother did NOT involve piano and computer. 

As God is Love, your  most loved activities should most definitely be taken into consideration when determining God's will for your life.  And I mean rational, absorbing love, not carnal itching or painkilling distractions. How you feel about Reese's peanut butter cups, Ryan Gosling (unless you are Mrs Gosling) and Doctor Who (unless you are a scriptwriter/costume designer) is pretty trivial.  He gave you the real loves, after all.

***

A word about Older Women Who Love to Give Advice. There are two kinds of older women in the world: older women who like younger women and older women who resent younger women and hate them like fire. Some older women are frank about their love or hate. Others are sneaky. Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky. If you've ever been stabbed in the back by a woman mentor, you will know exactly what I mean. 

And because older women can be sneaky, they will sometimes give you very bad advice, on purpose. They will counsel you to have sexual relations with someone before you are ready, or despite your religious beliefs that such a thing is seriously wrong, because (A) they know just how devastating such a thing can be and (B) they want to take you down a peg. There are women who don't want you to make their mistakes, and there are women who most DEFINITELY hope that you do. 

This is yet another reason, by the way, why you should not talk about such personal matters at work. Yes, women in woman-dominated offices do love talking about such personal matters and will pressure you to do it too. That said, I have learned a lot of good things from women in woman-dominated offices. I have even been challenged to be a better Christian by a most unlikely source, and in a totally unoffensive (if surprising) way. My advice for offices like that is to be a good sport about the recipes, the horoscopes and the internet memes, but to graciously sidestep the sex talk. Note other women who refrain from sex talk and make a point of befriending them.

Racial Incident on the Rough Bus

At last I went outdoors. It was sunny but not really warm. There was a cold wind, so I wore my green-blue tam, scarf and mittens with my green-blue coat. And, not to put a fine point on it, three days of virus had left me the colour of mould, so I had put some make-up on. Off I went in the direction of the train station, thinking of curry.

I terribly wanted curry. Curry would taste like something. Food has not really been tasting like much lately. Proper food, I mean. Doritos, yesterday's craving, taste like Doritos, no matter what. 

I ran out of energy before I got to the train station, so I took refuge from the wind in a bus shelter and panted a bit and blew my nose. The Rough Bus appeared over the bridge, so I got on the Rough Bus and took a seat near the front. 

Eventually and surprisingly, a very tall, clean-shaven, western-clothed South Asian youth got on. It was surprising because I don't see a lot of South Asians on the Rough Bus and never at that bus stop. And this one was extremely tall, had neither bag nor baggage, and looked a bit crazy. He folded himself into a seat, looked around with huge empty eyes and then stared at the ceiling.  After observing him nervously, I decided that he was probably simple rather than crazy and also completely harmless. 

One or two stops later, a Typical Rough Bus Young Couple got on, by which I mean he was skinny and violent-looking, and she was almost as round as a ball. They were, naturally, Scottish (or, to give the word its Rough Bus pronunciation, Scaw'ish), and he had red, which is to say, orange hair. Orange hair, orange eyebrows, orange eyelashes, insofar as he had eyelashes, rather like me. If I had had a son, he would have looked like Carrot Top. He was the same dead white colour as my coughing self. He could have been my second cousin.

However,  he was not one of our beautiful redheads. No. In fact, when I saw him, I was very tempted to move farther back down the bus. Had the bus been an elevator I would have got off at once. He horsed around with his giggling girlfriend until he spotted the tall South Asian chap, and then his dead white face creased with hatred and contempt.

"Aw," he said to the clean-shaven South Asian chap. "Whut are you daein' here? You're disgustin'."

"Oh mah goad shu'up," murmured his round dark-haired girlfriend. "Oh mah goad shu'up."

She shook with silent giggles. 

"Disgustin'," repeated Carrot Top.

"Oh yeah, and you're a member of the Master Race," I thought sourly, as he made nasty remarks about the "benefits" (welfare) he assumed the thin giant was on. But what could I do? I was as weak as a kitten, and I knew from long experience that Edinburgh bus drivers do not leave their protective booths for anything. If I told Carrot Top to shut his racist face, the Incident would escalate and involve little me, who probably shouldn't have been out of bed. 

Eventually Carrots lost interest in his victim, but I wondered what I could have done, if anything. Maybe I could have got up pointedly and sat beside the South Asian guy. At very least that might have cheered him up. When I glanced at him, he was looking out the window. Although a head or more taller than Carrots, he hadn't said boo. 

I am not exactly a saint of political correctness. I have been contemplating the powerlessness of founding peoples in the face of mass migration since "the Italian girls" were mean to me in elementary school.* But one thing that gets up my nose more than anything else in Scotland is Scots racially bullying others on public transport. 

I realize that these bullies are usually Scots of the "socially excluded class" and that British post-war history has handed them a raw deal. I understand that there are fewer than 5 million Scots resident in Scotland whereas there are 38 million Poles resident in Poland and a billion Indians in India. When you're talking world minorities, the blue-eyed, red-haired, Scotland-born Scottish one is mighty small, and if such Scots go south for work they run the risk of being called "Ging-er" and "Jock" and given a hard time about the SNP. Heck, when my red-haired great-grandfather George emigrated to English-speaking Canada in 1900 he was called "Scotty" for the rest of his life, and his son was generally known as "Red." 

However, bullying people on the bus for their origins is lower than low, and it happens way too often for my liking. People can think whatever they like, and they can certainly say whatever they like in the privacy of their own homes, and if they are that exercised about migration, they can vote UKIP and give the other parties a good scare. But on public transport everyone can and should keep a civil tongue in their heads. 

Finally I decided that what I could do was get up when the South Asian guy got up and stand between him and my fellow ginger, so at very least Carrots couldn't hit him on the way out. And when we both got off the bus, I said, "I'm sorry you had to put up with that."

"Thank you," he said in a high, flute-like voice and eventually loped across the street.

*And, yes, that most certainly includes the various tribes of 16th-19th century North America trying to cope with the sudden and overwhelming influx of Europeans.