Volunteering and a weekend off

August 2023

I haven't written anything for ages, but I've got some unattractive tasks ahead of me so I thought I'd cushion the experience with some leisure writing first, even though it turns out there's not much to say.

After a lovely weekend with friends in Nottingham I drove on to Adhisthana, the retreat centre near Ledbury where I volunteer. This time I haven't been put in the kitchen or the office, but am helping in advance of their biggest event of the year, where all rooms are filled and the field is open for camping too. There are so many guests that a marquee is erected as a shrine room and the barn is used for meals. The barn accumulates junk through the year, so one job has been to clear it out and set it up ready for food service. Stocks of food are ordered, paper plates and cups have arrived, and there's all the usual cleaning to be done.

Surprisingly, the job I most enjoyed involved refilling all the cleaning product bottles and distributing them round the site - hand wash, surface cleaning spray, toilet cleaner and washing up liquid. But most of the time I was cleaning areas that already looked pretty clean to me, which I take to be a good reason why I have strongly resisted being put in charge of any cleaning operation. Given the numbers who are coming, if it were down to me I'd just wait to clean up afterwards - they're going to make it so much more dirty than it is now. Anyway, the housekeeper was very complimentary about how tidy the cleaning product refilling station was after I'd finished.

I've been given the weekend off and a half day next week, so came home to find UJ had already gone for a weekend away. I had a proper day off on Saturday, and finished watching the huge three-part series about the Beatles recording their penultimate album and performing on the roof of the Apple building in London in 1969, which I was vaguely aware of but didn't know any of the details. I found it hugely moving and have been affected by it for days now.

When I went out on Saturday Leamington was teeming with people. The bowling greens are hosting their annual national competition, then the Pump Room gardens were full of the Warwickshire Pride festival, with stalls offering everything in rainbow colours and a sound stage and a funfair. Moving on towards Jephson Gardens there was a wedding reception happening, and also a chap with a funny-looking horn was playing it through the railings into the Jephson memorial building to make the sound resonate more. I do love Leamington when it's busy.

Now I am 60

Then I was 8

My significant birthday has been and gone with very little fuss. It was hot, I went for a walk but spent the day mostly at home. The next day I went to visit mum to get some more of the admin done, but first we had to get her to a clinic appointment and then took advantage of the proximity to Lidl to give her the opportunity to do some shopping in person. As dad had acquired lactose intolerance in the last few years, mum has been enjoying the opportunity to indulge in dairy produce again and we came home with three kinds of cheese.

The admin seems to grow each time I look at it. Unfortunately, as I pick up the different strands we seem to uncover conflict each time - in addition to the fight with Thames Water about their overcharging for the period when we had a leak, we're in conflict with an investment company and now possibly also the Burial Society that arranged dad's funeral. Then there's the routine stuff that just comes around every year - household insurance, a new gas and electricity contract, broadband, servicing the stairlift, the Lifeline pendant for communicating in an emergency, and on and on. I am starting to recognise where I need to pass things over where before I imagined I would be doing it all.

After visiting mum I went on to pick up Lola II and Mr M and bring them to Leamington for a few days. Mr M had to work for some of the time, but he joined us for meals. Lola II and I went for a lovely walk with friends, and then an organ concert in the local church with a student organist who looked much too young to be out on his own. Then I had to get home for a couple of phone calls, one of which was with Mr MXF who has kindly passed on one of his old phones but needed to help me to unlock it.

I needed a newer phone because various apps had started telling me that they would no longer run on my old one. The transfer process wasn't too bad except that at one point I lost concentration and all of my past WhatsApp messages disappeared. Luckily this isn't a disaster, in fact it's barely an inconvenience. Given the state of the old phone's screen protector, an early priority is to get similar protection for the new one.

At the weekend, the Art in the Park festival was taking place in town. I'm sure this event has happened for many years, but somehow I've never been - it's huge, and full of all kinds of artistry from photography to an art-producing bicycle via jewellery, spray paint, oil, watercolour, collage and almost everything you can think of. We saw about half of it, and I was going to go back for the second day but had too much to do at home.

One of the reasons for Lola II's visit was to help me get some jobs done that are difficult to start on my own - they just need a bit of encouragement, or go easier with two of us working together. We started with my old iPod, which used to mean more to me than it does now - it has become redundant since Audible discontinued the app that allowed me to download podcasts onto it.* It will eventually go onto ebay but I need a period of 10 days when I'm at home so I can manage bids and postage and that isn't happening until September. While I was grappling with that, Lola II cleaned my windows!

[* Since then I've started using Spotify for both podcasts and books and cancelled my Audible subscription altogether, so who's the loser?]

And finally I had a non-birthday treat which ended up feeling like a birthday treat because sisters and friends came with me for lunch at my favourite Café Soya in Birmingham followed by a performance of the musical 'Hamilton'. It was quite a spectacle, which was lucky because there are a lot of words and it was quite difficult to follow the plot. Some of our party had seen it before and others had done some homework, but I now feel the need to go and listen while reading the lyrics to catch up on the bits I might have missed.

What I've been reading

The Accidental Tourist
by Anne Tyler

narrated by Joe Barrett

"After the loss of his son and the departure of his wife, Macon neatly folds his anguish back into place and adapts the household on to more efficient lines. But with the arrival of Muriel, an eccentric and vulnerable dog trainer from the Meow-Bow dog clinic, his attempts at ordinary life are tragically and comically undone."

The sort of book I have been looking for on the Classics list - not 'clever', not 'original', but with a story that has some pace, characters that can be distinguished from one another, and a structure to the book that makes sense. In that regard I was very pleased to have read it; the only problem was that I didn't find the dilemma at the heart of the story plausible. Should he return to the wife who had left him or stay with the woman who had taken her place? I didn't warm to either of them so his eventual choice became arbitrary.

Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter

"Fevvers is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney's circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, journalist Jack Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia."

What a ride this book took me on, alongside a menagerie of exotic and flamboyant characters led by the earthy Fevvers. When I was at university someone recommended reading Angela Carter's stories based on fairy tales, and I did, but didn't really understand the appeal back then. This book and the fact that I still remember the other one forty years later is tempting me to try reading that other book again, with forty years of life experience and love and loss and pain and joy. That's what this story has done, and it was a wild and wonderful ride.

Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee

"A club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then a Christian minister offers a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife."

I do like a family saga, and this was particularly interesting because of the setting in Korea and Japan from the first world war onwards. I didn't have any prior knowledge of the relationship between these two nations, and learned a little alongside the main story of the family's fortunes over this period. A good read, but not outstanding.

Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening
by Stephen Batchelor

"What the Buddha taught was not something to believe in, but something to do. The book demystifies Buddhism by explaining, without jargon or obscure terminology, what awakening is and how to practise it. "

My enjoyment of this book was significantly diminished because the previous owner had added their own extensive notes to every page and almost every paragraph. I had no interest in their views, and it's hard to focus on the printed words with such distracting annotations. It's probably worth another look at a clean copy because the author had some useful things to say.

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive
by Alexander McCall Smith

"As winter turns to spring across Botswana's red earth and slow green rivers, all is not well on Zebra Drive. Mma Ramotswe has plenty of work, ranging from thefts at the printing works to suspicious deaths at the Mochudi hospital. But when Mr J.L.B. Matekoni - trying to prove himself as a worthy husband - has to go at a little detective work, disaster looms."

I picked this up from a train station book swap shelf because I'd run out of my own reading material, otherwise I wouldn't have chosen to add another to my collection of Ladies Detective Agency books. It's OK though - you know what you're going to get, and he evokes the atmosphere of Botswana so well.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use it

by Oliver Burkeman

"We're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction, and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the question of how best to use our ridiculously brief time on the planet, which amounts on average to about four thousand weeks."

This book was given to me by the leader of the retreat I went on in July. He gave each of the team members a different book so some thought went into the choice. I am a perfect match for this book because it turns out (according to the author) that I, like him, am a 'productivity geek'. And during this very retreat, I had come to the same conclusion that the author proposes: it isn't helpful to imagine that everything one wishes to do can be done, and acknowledging this fact makes life much easier.

The Minnipins
by Carol Kendall

narrated by Lola II

"In an isolated valley, the Minnipins minded their jobs, dressed simply, and never questioned the leading family. Then five rebels are exiled to the mountains and find that the deadly Mushroom tribe is coming to attack their countrymen."

A children's book written in 1959, this has been my bedtime story whenever Lola II and I have been in the same place with the book and we haven't been too tired. So it's taken a considerable length of time (probably more than a year?) compounded by the fact that the early chapters contain a lot of detail and many names so at one point we had to start again because I'd forgotten who was who. After all that, I hate to have to say that I don't think it's a particularly good story, and character development is particularly poor. Of course the Minnipins survive, rifts are healed and there's a happy ending, but at the expense of too much violence - not fairy tale violence, but heaps of dead bodies of the Mushroom people graphically killed by the sword-wielding Minnipins.

The Ten Pillars of Buddhism
by Sangharakshita

"In a world marked by rapid changes, shifting lifestyles and values, how can we be sure that we are making the best choices for ourselves, others and the world? This small book explores ten basic Buddhist ethical principles and the liberating view of ourselves contained within them."

Lectures given in 1984 have been transcribed and edited into this book, which I've been going through with my Buddhist friends who have also asked for ordination. We've looked at one principle at a time so it's taken a while. As an 'ordinary' Buddhist there are five guiding precepts, and this adds an extra five which are mostly around communication, building on the idea of truthful speech and advocating the avoidance of harsh, frivolous and slanderous speech and the cultivation of tranquillity and compassion as well as wisdom. Of course there's much more to it than these headlines or the lectures or the book can convey, but it gives a flavour that we've been discussing very fruitfully.