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Nemesis

Posted on February 11, 2009
While I am settling beautifully into country life, husband’s taking it a little less well. His exact words to me within twenty-four hours of returning to England from Los Angeles in early January were, at volume, “You’ve ruined it.”

By which he meant I’ve ruined his concept of our rural idyll. The Cotswolds is no longer the joyous place where we arrive together each Thursday night for the weekend, our worldly cares evaporating as we leave urban grit behind and roll past open landscape, starry skies, and stone cottages into the market square where the wine bar sits waiting for us with convivial conversation, a roaring fire, and glass or three of wine. It is now the place where I live, littered with the detritus of daily life like dishes in the sink and half-read New Yorkers. I was careful to minimize such evidence before husband showed up for the first time since I’d permanently moved into the country cottage, but he could imagine it and that was enough to whip him into a froth.

He doesn’t seem to remember that this was all his idea in the first place. Gone is any recollection of the way he tarted up a very dull job in nearby Swindon that I interviewed for unsuccessfully last summer. He was a used car salesman touting the merits of an IT directorship for a, yawn, computing society because it was after all a means to an end: to live full-time in the Cotswolds. His brain didn’t seem to make the logical follow-on calculation that if I got a job near the Cotswolds, I would be living here full-time but he would still have a job in London. Now he understands. I live in the beautiful Cotswolds all the time. I am the enemy. It’s a good thing I get two nights a week on my own.

January passes and, luckily for me, husband finds another person to hate. He has a new boss, who coincidentally used to work with me at my former London employer. Husband’s new boss is a music industry big shot, French, and was known to occasionally have a silent conversation with my chest in the elevator. This last fact is known to husband but is not what causes the new boss, already nicknamed Inspector Closeau, to become his nemesis. Husband just doesn’t like having a boss and the situation prior to Inspector Closeau’s arrival was that of a boss in name rather than practice. I am no longer person non grata numero uno, but husband’s resentment towards me still grows because I am unavailable in person two nights a week for him to bitch about the Inspector.

Still, the heat is off enough that I can safely share with husband some insight into the loveliness of my new daily life. There’s the gym I’ve joined in Cirencester, or “siren” as we locals call it. It’s run by the local council, but it’s nicer and cheaper than any private gym I’ve been to in London. You can park (for free!), there’s a café, and you get a little USB type key you plug into all the workout machines so they record your workout. With these kind of amenities no wonder people live in Gloucestershire. It’s a no brainer, the same way homeless people gravitate to Santa Monica. I think this rather than say it out loud to husband.

In his exasperation husband put the London flat on the rental market back in December, toying with the idea that he could join me in my full-time country life. This would mean about four hours of daily commute time assuming all goes smoothly, and with the recession in full swing and the rental market sagging, it seemed a bit of a bluff. There are, in fairness, gentlemen of a certain means who regularly commute into London from Gloucestershire. I’ve seen them on the railway platform with their laptop bags and velvet collared coats on the odd morning last year when I trained into London for work. But I suspect most of them have a pied-à-terre in London to accommodate the not infrequent train cancellations, bad weather, and occasional night out in London. We essentially have a pied-à-terre in London, it just costs about twice as much as life in the country which takes the air out of any charm associated with having property with a French nickname. We may have a house in Poshtershire, but we’re several salary zeros away from these commuting gents.

At the end of January we got a call from the estate agent. She had an offer on our flat from an Italian couple moving over to England to work. They were offering £300 per week, £10 less per week than we wanted. This made it easy. I said no, thinking the matter was closed. She called back the next day: the Italians would go to £310. We thought about it. We debated the pros and cons and did the math, all day, all night, and part of the next day. Crazily, the cost of a monthly train ticket is more than half of our monthly mortgage on the London flat which means there’s a lot of potential commuting aggravation without that much financial benefit in consolidating homes. I told husband it was his decision. He turned the offer down. The agent came back with an offer of £320 per week. Husband apologized, said no, and took the flat off the market. It appears, for now, we have a London flat. Make that a pied-à-terre.

Cotswolds

Sunday Lunch

Posted on February 2, 2009

Yesterday we participated in that quintessential English institution, Sunday lunch. This one was a belated birthday celebration for M., our resident raconteur, barman, writer, painter, and gallery owner. It was hosted by his ex-wife and, like all good parties, took place largely around the table in her farmhouse kitchen. After pheasant pie and potatoes dauphinoise but before almond cake and coffee, snowflakes started dancing outside the kitchen window which was already framing a picture perfect, winter white landscape. I was pretty sure Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson were about to walk through the door and join us for the cheese course.

An entire cast of Richard Curtis characters wouldn’t have been more interesting than the assembled company. In addition to the charms of M. and his lovely ex-, we were joined by a another couple. The husband is a journalist whose work I know from my favourite paper, The Weekend FT. This fact alone would have been enough to sustain me for the entire afternoon, but he turned out to be only too happy to further oblige my stereotype of an idiosyncratic former Fleet Street journalist. He looked like Paul Bunyan in a tan leather, safari style waistcoat, and, while the rest of the table drank Rioja, he steadily drained the bottle of The Famous Grouse and a small pitcher of water that had been set out at his place. (Unaware this arrangement was intended solely for his consumption and being American and in need of hydration — British people consume an alarmingly small quantity of water — I helped out with the pitcher of water. Husband only pointed out my faux pas after the lunch.) Between courses he smoked hand rolled cigarettes and told me stories about his early years in Los Angeles with his old friend, Robin Leach, and New York as a correspondent for The Times.

Neither did his wife disappoint. She was dressed in what I call Toff “I don’t give a shit” – a ripped hot pink cashmere v-neck, jeans, and leopard print loafers. I think it was my compliment of her ring (Fabergé) that sparked the conversation in which I learned her father had been a Pulitzer prize winning journalist who, while stationed in the A.P.’s Moscow bureau during the Stalin era, eloped with her mother, a ballerina in The Bolshoi. Have you ever wondered who would play you in the movie of your life? Well, Clark Gable played her father in the film version of her parents’ romance.

I ended up feeling a little sorry for her. How on earth are you ever supposed to live up to parents like that? It’s enough to make me grateful for my own parents’ mediocrity. Just last week on a phone call with my dad I had to explain to him what Cava was. He seemed downright fascinated to learn about this economically priced, Spanish sparkling wine. “How do you know about things like that?” he asked, his voice filled with genuine wonder.

Cotswolds

If the Shoe Fits

Posted on February 1, 2009

Yesterday I tried on a jacket at Pakeman Catto & Carter, a gentlemens and ladies clothier in Cirencester housed in a three story townhouse that’s all polished wood, glass cases, and dark carpets. The jacket was a tailored number made of green tweed with a coral coloured windowpane overlay and green silk lining. It was handsome, half-price, and fit me like a glove according to the sales assistant who called me madam and asked me to spin around as he assessed the length and shoulders. It was, he informed me, a hacking jacket, which I assume is another one of those cryptic horsey terms so prolific around these parts, like “on the gallops” or “a jolly.”

The only other time in my life where I would have fit in without note while wearing a tweed hacking jacket was at Camp Merrie Woode, the all girls-camp in North Carolina that I attended for three summers in a row between the ages of twelve and fourteen. The camp uniform consisted of forest green shorts and a grey sailor smock with a matching green tie. I felt like a martian when I showed up fresh from south Florida with my trio of skinny neon belts and heart bedecked Vans slip-ons to accessorize what I thought of as the hopelessly unstylish attire I was expected to wear day in and day out for the next three weeks (in my defense, this was the eighties). The other girls, girls with names like Darnell and Eleanor from Vermont and Maine and Georgia, wore LL Bean moccasins or plain white Tretorn sneakers, both essentially unisex styles that hadn’t changed since their mothers had worn them.

For summer number two I showed up with a pair of Tretorns, but in an attempt to maintain some integrity mine had a madras plaid “V” rather than plain white. I also brought my beloved pump spray bottle of Aqua Net (aerosol was my preference but strictly forbidden by camp rules) with which to coif my feathered bangs, only to have it diluted with water in a prank by my evil cabin-mate, thespian Kren. That summer I was permanently turned off of horse back riding when I was forced to muck out a stall, a “mandatory” part of our equestrian curriculum. It was difficult to keep my polka dot driving cap on my head while I scraped shit and mud out of a temperamental horse’s hoof with a hook, but I persevered. Someone around here had to stand up for fashion.

At the end of summer three, I cried when I saw my father waiting for me when I got off the plane. When he asked why I was crying I said, embarrassed, that it was because I was so sad to have left camp. The truth was I was overwhelmed with relief to be home, away from the freaky canoe and equestrian young people and back amongst teenagers who had the sense to fawn over my prized pink ankle boots, the ones that made me feel like I had a shot at Simon le Bon.

Back in Cirencester I admired myself in the mirror then hung the hacking jacket back on the sales rack. It was a beautiful jacket, but wearing it somehow felt disingenuous. It was a beautiful jacket for someone else.

Books Cotswolds

Rescue

Posted on January 10, 2009

My first week on the new job is in the bag. People complain about long commutes, but my drive time was one of the highlights of the week despite the frozen conditions. I’ve established a set of landmarks for my journey that go like this: The Royal Agricultural College or RAG, known as the Oxbridge for farmers; The Veg Shed, a farm shop on the estate of Prince Charles’ country house, Highgrove; then a series of villages with names that make me smile: Little Badminton, Petty France (I looked for but did not find Gracious Switzerland or Important Italy), and Old Sodbury, which I like to think is populated wholly by old sods; finally the motorway and the bright lights, big city of Bristol.

After the snow melted this week there was a true frost, transforming my commute into a bit of Narnia. The entire landscape looked like it had been flash frozen then sugar dipped. It was something I’d never seen before having grown up in Florida where frost refers to that one night a year when farmers worry the orange crop might be lost. But upon encountering this new found beauty I admit my first association wasn’t with fairytales, but rather the Russian Winterland wedding Joan Rivers threw for her daughter Melissa at the Plaza Hotel some years ago. Why my brain can produce this data from an ancient episode of Entertainment Tonight at the slightest provocation but not the location of my keys is one of life’s little mysteries.

Another such mystery is what exactly “Process Portal Framework” means. This was the subject of one of no fewer than twenty-eight PowerPoints I was given on Monday morning as an “induction pack” for my new job. By the time I got to the Process Portal Framework sometime on Friday afternoon I was pretty sure I hadn’t landed my dream job. It’s a good enough job, a well paying, middle management job in an interesting industry where I’ll get good experience I can use to parlay into yet another one of these kind of jobs. Which I realize may be very depressing sounding depending on just what kind of person you are but, for whatever it says about me, I feel just fine about it.

I cannot say I felt the same about seeing Katie Price next to Annie Proulx in the Fiction Ps at Waterstone’s today. I went in to buy a calendar (despite BlackBerry enabled Outlook syncing, husband and I are still dependent on a paper version to manage our new found active country social life attending bingo and fetes and such), but I have no self-control in bookshops and was soon browsing the shelves.

Katie Price is a glamour model (Britspeak for topless tabloid model) turned reality television star who has a commercially successful series of ghostwritten children’s books, adult novels, and no less than three autobiographies. Think of an industrious Pamela Anderson. She was most recently in the news for renewing her vows after a whopping three years of marriage to a man she met on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. I saw her in the fake tanned flesh two years ago when she was eating lunch in the same room as me at Royal Ascot, our collective presence perhaps revealing something about the social decline of this once venerated event. And there was Katie today, three volumes exactly, snuggled up to a single hardback of Annie Proulx’s latest book of short stories, Fine Just The Way It Is. Now Annie Proulx is one of my favourite authors, and this was an indignity I couldn’t tolerate. Even though I’ve already read it, I bought Annie just to rescue her from the slight. Of course I can afford to dispense such biblio-thropic acts of justice precisely because of my well-paying not so dreamy job, which in its own small way is a good enough sign that there’s some kind of order in this world.

Cotswolds

Living the Dream

Posted on January 6, 2009

So I’m back in England, living the full-time rural dream. I started my new job on Monday, which means I spend a lot of time in the car commuting now. Most of the ride I’m like James Herriot driving through picture postcard country lanes to that zippy music of the opening credits of “All Creatures Great and Small.” Only my car is a little more air-tight, which is handy since it was 24 degrees yesterday. It’s so cold I have crafted a special outfit for evenings around our drafty cottage (note to self: learn to build a fire). It consists of my black imitation Ugg boots, pale pink Chinese silk pajama pants, crusty oatmeal jumper with protruding long sleeve orange t-shirt, topped with a glen plaid LL Bean bathrobe. I look like a hobo who’s stolen a Russian dancer costume from a cut-rate production of The Nutcracker. It’s probably good for our marriage that husband isn’t going to be here much during the week.

Back to the commute. This morning I was getting a bit bored with Radio 4, England’s NPR, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and give Lenny’s Christmas gift, Laura Nyro’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession a spin. Now I know it’s not nice to speak ill of a lady who died of cancer, but Laura has not dated well. It reminded me of The Carpenters on amphetamines, all full of exhortations to “get happy!” or “come on down to the stoned soul picnic,” which is apparently replete with moonshine and sassafras. Plus a generous dollop of flutes and tambourines. I took Lenny’s advice and skipped the bonus tracks.

Cotswolds

Fat Tuesday

Posted on December 17, 2008

Last night we made an unexpected visit to the Cotswolds. Husband couldn’t find his passport and, since we’re flying out to the States on Saturday, decided it was worth driving out to see if it was at the cottage. It was, and so we happily retired to the wine bar for a quick glass before the dinner he bribed me with to get me to drive out with him.

It was a mellow night, welcome after last Friday’s conclusion to the Fat Boy lunch. R. the barman was on duty having long since been relegated to Tuesday nights from his previous post on Fridays. R. has been a constant in our Cotswold life. He was our original welcome wagon, and we spent many quiet Friday nights last year perched at the old bar talking with him before we got a Chinese takeaway and drove up to the rented cottage in G.P. He has a thick head of greying dark hair, a pink face, and smiling eyes. When he’s working he wears an apron over a checkered shirt, when not a leather waistcoat and a flat cap. Once I saw him across the lawn of a posh hotel party wearing a cravat. He calls himself a Zionist, is a Catholic Anglican, and his favourite book is Gordon Is a Moron. It was good to catch up with him and watch him break all the house rules, including serving “a pound’s worth” pours and letting the lovely labs, Fing and Inch, wander around off their leashes.

M. was there briefly, looking much more stable on his feet and much less red in the face than when I left him on Friday evening. E. also made a brief appearance — all the people who work in the wine bar seem to drink there too — long enough to update us on the success of her bird plucking business and to find out she’s disposing of all the feathers in a big hole at the bottom of her new boyfriend’s, a.k.a. Boy Racer, field. (I don’t know why I need to know things like whether sheep sleep indoors or what she does with all the feathers, but I do). R. had a brace of pheasants hanging on the coat rack, ready for her to take away. And G. was there, a permanent background presence nursing his customary two glasses of red.

There were a few new people as is always the case even after a year of evenings in the wine bar. I met the charming wife of twenty years of one of the Fat Boys, which was something of a relief since the majority of people around here seem to be divorced. A man came in to order a case of wine and stopped for a glass. Within five minutes I knew his ex-wife was a Roosevelt, a result of the potent combination of the Oxonian effect and the license to be gauche to which I’m entitled by nationality. The former refers to the phenomenon in which someone who went to Oxford will tell you they went to Oxford within the first eleven seconds of your conversation with them, which I’ve found extends to all kinds of things besides Oxford (like being related to Roosevelt by marriage, even if said marriage is now defunct). Of course the Oxonian effect helps make the wine bar the wine bar, and without it things would undoubtedly be less fun.

Cotswolds

Fat Boys

Posted on December 14, 2008

Friday was the Fat Boys lunch, an event husband had been invited to by M. and for which I had been enlisted as a chauffeur. Husband was titillated by his inclusion and spent the morning weighing his clothing options aloud like a teenage girl anguishing over her prom dress. Coral coloured cashmere sweater vest or tweed blazer? Was his sheepskin coat too “urban”?

The arrangement was to meet at the wine bar at noon. At 12:30PM husband was just wrapping up a call so I was dispatched to the wine bar on my own to stall for him. I used the time to enquire about the etymology of the lunch’s name since the attendees, while not in danger of anorexia, were neither overtly fat nor boys. A., a local writer who resembled Paul Bunyan in his leather waistcoat, attempted to explain as he poured me half a glass of champagne (I was the driver after all). The account was delivered in an authoritative and confident voice that tricked me into believing it was a coherent response, a common characteristic of the posh spoken. There was something about Oxford and self-employment and a loose association with the arts, but it took some prodding before I was finally able to work out that the most important qualification was that you didn’t have to go back to the office afterward. As A. commented in a moment of unusual lucidity, “I’ve always thought if you don’t have it done by Friday lunchtime, you’re unlikely to get it done by the end of the day anyway.”

Overall the explanation had a bit of machismo, chest beating pride on behalf of the assembled guests, who included a magazine editor, the publisher of a local newspaper, writers, and a former military man turned vintner. Husband in fact is in the employ of someone else who might reasonably expect to be able to reach him on Friday afternoon, but seemed to qualify on the basis of his employer’s association with the the-uh-tah and possibly because I drive a station wagon which M. suspected he could persuade me to chauffeur. But all these men shared at least the illusion of being in charge of their own destiny for this particular afternoon, and they were going to spend it drinking copious amounts.

Husband materialised (having chosen coral cashmere) and, after a case of wine was loaded into the trunk of the car, we were off. The brief journey to the pub was no cause for a respite in gossip. A story about how the ex-wife of one of the Fat Boys had a lover in common with Princess Di (presumably the reason she is now an ex) was my reward before depositing my charges at the door of the pub.

The call to retrieve them came five hours later. When I arrived they were on whiskey and cognac and there was no sign of the case of wine. One suede loafered man was wondering around with a half empty bottle of port, and the ex-army officer turned winemaker was telling me how he was shocked to learn over lunch that I stripped my way through college to pay the bills. After an aborted attempt to find someone from Suffolk presumed to still be in the pub, I managed to herd them into my car and back to the wine bar where the man from Suffolk had already made his way.

The scene that followed was much as you might expect after a dozen men have spent five hours drinking champagne, beer, red wine, port and whiskey. M. kept falling into a coat rack. His ex-wife did not look amused, and was not her same warm, friendly self towards me. I imagined she was rather horrified husband seemed to have fallen in with this crew and assumed our marriage was headed for the same eventual destiny as her own. Husband mistook a request for his last name from a fellow fat boy attendee as some kind of insult, then insisted his response was meant to be “a joke.” The man from Suffolk kept telling me his life was a mess — just back after ten years in Japan, freshly divorced and with two kids — all of which seemed incongruent since he reminded me of the gay, lecherous Uncle Monty from Withnail and I from the moment I first saw him.

It seemed best to dissociate myself from the fat boys, so I mingled. The most amusing of my new acquaintances was a portly man of about sixty who was a good six inches shorter than me with thick, black-rimmed glasses on a cord, horrible teeth, and a very posh accent. When I asked him what he did he said, “My dear, I own Farmington,” which is the village up the hill from us. Twice he told me I had a very red nose, which is true, and twice that he’d just as soon comment on my body as my nose but he couldn’t see it underneath my coat. Despite his behaviour which I suppose could be construed as piggish, I found him entertaining and was half tempted to drop the coat and strike a pose. All the better that I didn’t seeing that his wife was losing her patience at his refusal to leave the wine bar and go to dinner. His defense was that he wasn’t leaving with a bloody half bottle of wine left. She barked orders at him like he was a naughty dog, which I suspect was deserved, and finally he made his exit. Husband had apparently had his fill of being a man in charge of his own destiny and offered no resistance when I told him it was time to go, using the age old lure of sausage, chips and curry from the Chinese takeaway across the square.

Cotswolds

The Weekend of Prodigious Eating

Posted on December 1, 2008

The weekend of prodigious eating started, fittingly enough, with Thanksgiving. I cooked for husband and the neighbors, and the evening went off without a hitch other than the disappearance of twenty gourmet marshmallows that dissolved into my sweet potato casserole because I left it in the oven too long. (It took visits and enquiries to no fewer than five London shops, including Selfridges, to find those marshmallows. When a specialist American candy shop in Covent Garden couldn’t help, I conceded to the artisan fluff on offer at Whole Foods at a cost of approximately 35 cents per marshmallow, only to find a jumbo bag of the things at a gas station about 2 miles from our cottage in the Cotswolds.) There were some minor concessions to this being a British Thanksgiving, including substituting brussel sprouts and roasted potatoes for peas and mash, adding a cheese course, and the fact that there were pheasants alongside the turkeys on my printed novelty napkins. I enjoyed being the cultural authority for the evening—there are not many occasions for this as an American in Britain—and made everyone go around the table and say what they were thankful for.

Then there was the mulled wine. The first was with a bratwurst at the German Christmas market in Cheltenham to celebrate passing my driving test on the first try, much to the surprise of husband and in spite of the fact that my driving instructor was fired by the automobile association the day before, as it turns out for threatening to “thump” another instructor, not his teaching skills. The second was consumed with a slice of panettone following the Advent carol service in G.P.

In between there was a lamb roast at doppelganger couple’s house, during which they confided they’ve also gained weight since moving to the country. It seems our metabolisms, starved of urban stress and toil, go into hibernation. Folds of flesh now reveal themselves at the slightest bend, and when I sit, accordion pleats materialise around my torso. I’ve taken to grasping my sides and kneading them as I attempt to locate ribs, kind of like that piano song where you roll your knuckles back and forth across the black keys. It’s as if I am still convincing myself that, yes, I am quite fat.

The apex of the weekend’s feasting took place on a fine evening, sitting in the marigold velvet arm chairs in front of the fire at our local inn. My menu selection was carnivorous, worthy of a place at Henry VIII’s table. I started with a dish of gherkins, then ham hock and parsley terrine followed by a beef and Guinness pie topped with an oyster on the half shell, washed down with three tumblers of red wine, and informed by the pink remains of the FT Weekend. Duly fortified for battle, I settled into the couch for a Louis Theroux documentary on the American phenomenon of the demolition derby, which made me a little homesick.

On Sunday afternoon we went to the recycling centre to dump the wine bottles from Thanksgiving. As I peered into the shipping container-sized receptacle for green glass I saw inside a thousand empty wine bottles, the detritus of Gloucestershire’s great and good. Gluttony lives on in these slim times.

Cotswolds

A Place to Sleep

Posted on November 30, 2008

This afternoon I curled up on the couch under a blanket and read a book. It is cold in this stone house so beneath the blanket I also wore wooly tights and slippers and fingerless gloves. And yet husband sat upstairs with the window open while he tapped away at his laptop, analyzing Google ad words. The taps turned into thumps as they streamed down the stairwell and reverberated over my head. Twice the sound of a music box or carousel or ice cream truck—surely it’s too cold for ice cream?— almost lured me to the window to investigate its source. Each time the twinkly song faded before I was motivated from my cocoon.The electric heaters in each room seem to be placed for aesthetics more than utility. All are next to doors or windows so most of the expensive heat they do produce is instantly leeched away. If there was a fire this afternoon, which there was not, the flames would have beat against the glass door of the stove making a sound loud enough that I once got out of bed to look thinking there was some kind of ruckus going on in the narrow pedestrian lane behind our cottage where the local teenagers like to march up and down and strew with candy wrappers and Red Bull cans. Today there was only the pleasant cacophony of keyboard thumps and the clicking refrigerator, the latter of which I suspect is a war wound from its tenure in the floods. The absence of noise in the countryside amplifies what sound there is. There’s the predictable stuff like birds and church bells, but also the whistle of wind blowing through hollow metal gate posts on an afternoon walk, a sort of homemade woodwind, and the booming noises on our morning run, like base heavy gunshots or little explosions from a quarry. We used to hear the same noise each weekend morning from our little rental cottage in G.P., but I still don’t know what makes it.I ran into my two favourite shepherds the other night at the wine bar. As usual I started quizzing them about sheep farming, and for some reason felt the need to enquire if sheep are brought inside at night in this cold weather. The answer is no, but in the process of telling me this D. also explained the origin of the word Cotswold, which I was surprised I don’t know after almost a year of being here. Wold means rolling hills and cot refers to an old stone sheep shelter. It literally means a place to sleep in the hills, which reminded me of one of the reasons we were motivated to buy a cottage here to start: to escape from the noise of our London flat.

Cotswolds

Wrong Turn

Posted on November 24, 2008

The Ritalin vacation is officially over. Ten months ago husband started the Ritalin-free weekend experiment. It’s been patchy all along but the last three weekends have brought nightmarish mood swings, and we both agree it’s time to reevaluate with the help of a medical professional. My own patience collapsed over a trivial incident, as is always the way, on Sunday morning. While driving to church I nearly missed a turn despite having driven this route a hundred times before.

“Where did you think you were going?” husband asked twice for good measure.

“Fuck off. It was a mistake, I make them,” I replied at volume.

We exchanged no other words until after the Prayers of Penitence. Husband nudged me. Softened by prayers admitting what asses we all are, I assumed he was too and expected an apology or at least a smile that implied as much. Instead I was told off in hushed tones for wearing my gloves in church. Never mind that my fuzzy, black, fingerless gloves are my favourite utility purchase since my snap on waterproof bicycle basket, perfect for staying warm while engaging in tasks that require dexterity like opening hymnals. It’s cold in this old stone church. And, it’s not exactly formal. A black lab snoozed at the feet of the elderly occupants of the pew in front of us. The gloves stayed on.

Then Godfrey the vicar opened his sermon with a prayer from Mother Teresa:

Though you hide yourself behind the unattractive disguise of the irritable, the exacting, the unreasonable, may I still recognize you, and say: “Jesus, my patient, how sweet it is to serve you.”

The irritable, the exacting, the unreasonable. Interesting. I always associated Mother Teresa with lepers, but she also seems to have spent time with husband.

My fuming continued unabated during the Prayers of Intercession that followed. I prayed shamelessly for ME ME ME, not Iraq or Afghanistan or the bloody queen.

Next up was communion, which I usually sit out for a variety of reasons, the main one being that it’s all about the crucifixion, the very heart of what separates Christianity from other religions. And that separation, that thing that makes people feel special or different or better than, is the very thing I despise in religion. Whether it’s the three precepts or the five pillars or the ten commandments, the major world religions have more in common than not, and I’d prefer to focus on that. Then there’s the hygiene issue. Call me anal retentive but all those people drinking out of the same glass grosses me out. And finally there’s the technically correct and less controversial reason I gave the vicar when he asked me last month why I abstained. I’m not confirmed in the C of E, so I assumed it wasn’t kosher, so to speak. He assured me it wasn’t an issue.

As my half of the tiny congregation filed up to the altar, Dorothy, the eighty-year old shopkeeper sitting opposite, looked me in the eye and said, “He said you should come.”

“What?” I replied despite having heard exactly what she said.

“He said you should come,” she repeated, leaning in and clasping my arm.

Dorothy had clearly overheard my previous conversation with the vicar. But for a brief moment in my vulnerable state I thought the “he” in her mandate was God on some kind of direct line to her with advice for the pouting woman across the aisle.

And so I did what I had been told to do and filed up to the railing where I kneeled and waited. Godfrey deposited a wafer into my open palm — it had seemed right to remove my gloves for this. Jean the lay minister followed offering a sip of port from the silver chalice, enough to dislodge the styrafoam disc now stuck to the roof of my mouth. Both spoke softly and directly to each participant: the body of Christ, the blood of Christ. This wasn’t the self-service communion of my Presbyterian childhood, where large gold trays holding plastic shot glasses of grape juice and stale torn bread are passed around. This was different. It felt like being ministered to, which I suppose is exactly what I needed.