Cats and cats and singing and cats

We have been on holiday! Because of not going to France, again, a UK based selection of friends went to some holiday cottages in Norfolk where we could be close-but-still-abiding-by-the-indoors-6-person-rules and could do things like outdoor trips, readthroughs and eating in the open air and that sort of thing.

It was wonderful. I cried a lot and was stressed and anxious and had forgotten even the tiny inklings of how to trust that people might be able to put up with me being in the same room as them I have been trying to build, but even then, it was wonderful. Almost like we were back in the before times.

There was Norwich for the cathedral, Mother Julian's church and then ice cream with fluffymark's cousins and their kids.  There were seals on Blakeney point, Walsingham for Mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham and a walk in the Abbey Gardens (and a visit to the tat shop), Hunstanton for the seaside and flying Mark's new kite, Holt and Sheringham for steam trains, a lovely hike/clamber over a broken bit of hike courtesy of atreic's planning & orienteering.  There were two readthroughs (Arcadia and A Man For All Seasons) and paper telephone and pancakes and I managed to wrap not-vine leaves into parcels which kind of held together when you tried to eat them and I only had, ooh, a couple of dozen panic attacks over the week, which is pretty good all in. 

I missed the other people from France terribly, though, and now we are back into the stupid pandemic world.  Although I feel like maybe I am not so very buried by that as I was.

One thing that was particularly useful was hanging off the back of the Short Hike to give my brain a bit of time to process Stuff, as there is a lot of brain stuff that I have been bundling up and labelling Work and Pandemic.  While these are both stressors, I think there are other things like dysphoria and other gender stuff, and the need for a better mental health regimen, and probably a need for some form of therapy which I should be looking at.  So I now have a Big List of Priorities which I have to try to do in a sensible order.  

Coming home we were greeted by all five cats within an hour of us being back, which I was not expecting.   The three youngest were very shouty and I feel quite bad that they probably didn't have a sense of whether we had just left or not.  Lucky and Whisky have been through this countless times, but the boys not for a very long time and they might not remember, and we have never really left the kitten as she was six months old in March 2020.  Now they're all grumpy because we've shut them in with us, but I want to reconfirm that sense of us all as a family unit a little bit before they go back out.

We also came home to an arsey letter from the parish council saying that we're not cultivating enough of our allotment, which is true but it's because we've got half of it solarizing under a tarp as it had seeded in some grass during the bit last year where I wasn't feeling safe to go anywhere.  I called mum for some guidance and managed to catch her while she was on her allotment, so we also benefited from the wisdom of Derek the allotment committee guru who has the plot next door.  The consensus was that our council appear to be jobsworthy wankers and we could try arguing with them, but the path of least resistance would be to roll back the tarp (the grass should have died by now) and plant that area full of things that take up space, and do some tidy up for the things which were next on our list to sort out at the same time. 

Mum has some squashes and late brassicas which she can spare us because she always over-germinates and then gives away the surplus when her allotment is full, and we took a trip to a garden centre today where we found leeks, sweetcorn, and some courgettes, marrows and jack o'lantern pumpkins which are slightly over-ready to go in the ground.  So my mum is heroically going to dig and plant the covered bit during the weekdays, and on weekends we are going to carve our way through the raspberry thicket which looks like it ought to have a castle and a sleeping princess inside it, and I will also put my remaining flowers around the roses so they can't complain about coverage.  So my mum is a hero, and we will be doing some very sarcastic gardening, which is my favourite kind.

Now, I am exhausted.  I feel like it's far more exhausted than I have any right to be, but people are hard, and doing things is hard, and I don't even have the spare energy to be too anxious about going back into work tomorrow, which is probably a very good thing.  So I shall have a nap, and then go and cook my lovely husband something (hopefully) edible for dinner.

I'm mostly putting this here so I can point my vicar Paul at it (the chap who married us) but if anyone else has an opinion please do feel free to express it, albeit please do so gently.

I believe in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I believe in the crucified Christ, the Resurrection, one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and the life everlasting.

I believe in lots of things that the Anglican Church espouses. (I was baptised and confirmed in the Church of England).

I believe in a few things the Roman Catholic Church espouses (I have historically called myself Anglo-catholic.)

Participation in the Mass has always been a key part of my spiritual practise.

I believe in a few things that would raise eyebrows in a lot of churches (I am a student of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, and I am looking with interest at the last half century or so of Wicca and Witchcraft practise in this country). I understand all these things in the context of my faith in the Holy Trinity and I don't think it makes me, by definition, not a Christian.

(I you think it does please can we debate that particular issue another time as really is somewhat of a red herring, but it is part of the picture.)

I have lost faith, repeatedly, in the concept of the Church, and churches, both historic and present, from the told experiences of others and the experience of stigmatisation, loneliness, bullying and wielding of personal power that I have been through in my own life.

(NONE OF THESE ARE AT TANWORTH, PAUL.)

I find myself now unable to say one critical line of the Nicene Creed. I don't believe in one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, certainly not in the way I currently understand that phrase to refer to the Church and various churches on Earth.

Do I, in light especially of the previous statement, have to give up the Eucharist? Is it fair on other people in a communion for me to partake? Should I not attend Mass any more?

Please feel free to comment below with answers, or nice comforting hugs and pictures of floofy cute things, because this is an acutely distressing question to have reached and hugs are nice.