Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Thirty One - Lost In Christmas

I met the approaching season of commercial good will, a/k/a Christmas, with a familiar weariness. I counted myself thankful that with relatively few friends I had fewer Christmas cards to send, beyond the cards to family. The card from my landlady was the best. It had a cartoon of a man in front of his self decorated Christmas tree. He had put an image of himself at the top of his Christmas tree. As affirmative humour about isolation went, that image went a long way with me.

My Christmas had been and gone in the autumn, when for the first time my sister drove mother and my niece Vicki to see me in Lady Bay. We had a cheerful afternoon, no conflicts, no notable evasions, small changes to update each other about. Dad was barely mentioned. The highlight of the day was getting out of the house for the walk over the field across the road from the house where we collected a few late but still tasty blackberries from the brambles to eat fresh.

There Vicki was safe to walk in her own and she walked at some distance from us but consistently kept a distance that put the adults head level with the horizon. Thus proving research I had read where asserted children would do this with adults they followed given choice. The back story was about asking why mothers insisted on their child to hold their hand so often in public. Parental separation anxiety was the answer. The mothers' concern were expressed as anxiety about where children might be. Given a safe space to walk through the child would line the parent's head up with the horizon and follow. Anxious mothers were less concerned with any logic of their child might have, and more concerned with their own insecurities. I too had reasons for keeping family at distance and establishing my own sense of perspective where I saw my family as part of the world. This time my distance theory was proven and quietly accepted. Which was something children could not do in town when their mothers held their hands.

Calm and relaxed, my mother and sister stayed for afternoon tea. I knew better than to ask mother to sit for a portrait photo, she would close her eyes for the camera. In fact she would close her eyes if she saw a camera near by and might without asking capture her likeness, as if she disliked her appearance.

That Christmas I appreciated the fare presented by Radio 4 more than what was put out on television. I have few memories by which to date my increasing attachment to Radio 4 for, beyond my summer 1991 musing in the mid week Bible study. When yet again we were struggling with early Old Testament 'clobber passages' and unreliable patriarchs part in jest I mused 'Does the difficulty understanding these readings present to us explain why I like 'The Archers' so much on Sunday Mornings?' What I liked about 'The Archers' was how routine it was, absurd as some of the plots in it were. If liking 'The Archers' and Alistair Cooke's 'Letter from America' were signs to me of my ageing then I was ready to embrace them.

The new tidied up me made my fitting in with the church as a holding place easier. But it did little settle me in the church. Only if a new assistant pastor, or similar figure who was as helpful to me as Pasto Lou had been, would my sense of looking for the exit from church reduce. Such figures as would hold me in the church always appear through random encounters. Christmas was no time to look for spontaneity.

One of the people who never needed a Christmas card was Graham R. All year round he put his confidence in The Guru Who With No Prior Notice Would Transform The World. He could support one guru at one time, another guru another time. Whoever he supported when I spoke to him, he would forget who all the prior gurus had been. If I could call whoever followed when was talked a teacher then I could quite easily agree with him when we spoke and he dismissed the seasons that popular commerce had adapted from the church calendar to their seasons for the different types of advertising, because gurus did not need such support.

I could imagine the discussion with him, where when I found supportive logic and reasons of my own with which to agree him on my own terms he would then say that what I'd said could not be quite right because it was logical and with that it was too much part of the old world that the Guru was going to take away. So what he believed in was a guru or teacher who could be followed at a distance but if his followers formed frame work for how to follow, then because it was a framework it looked too much like what had been accepted before: the framework had to be faulty. Only the absence of a framework could be right.

Graham would have said that he was easy to agree with: the ground rules were the ground rules of the moment. I would have said that he resisted being tied to any particular long term way of thinking. My church might have seen me as more like him than I would have accepted.

I never discussed Homosexuality with Graham. The subject was never part of any shared moment he knew of. But if discussion of the subject had been part of any shared moment between us he would have, quite rightly, have asked me. 'You say you are Christian and yet your Christianity is unforgiving of your homosexuality. How does that fit together?' he would have been right to ask. The answer would have revealed to us both how painfully divided I felt. If I had a logical defence for a faith that left me divided it would have paraphrased the appeal of soul music to him. 'Many American soul musicians have felt the pull between the sexual self and the spiritual/altruistic self, and conflated the two in music amid a racist culture that inhibits black self expression. If Black heterosexuals can have that then so can white gay men.'. I would have been half right. I could not guess how accepting and compassionate his reply would have been. But such ideas were 'if only's', he was not there to test the exchange of views out with.

He would still reverted to 'The world we are both in now could be utterly changed forever with the right collective belief in the right guru in the right instant.'. Though it has yet to happen I will leave him with the last word on that.  

If Graham's short cut to his holding place was the hope of instant universal change then fine. But the nearer home the short cut to the holding place, was the more fraught the short cut felt for me. I liked living in Lady Bay, among so many teachers and social workers. These church people were well educated, and raised the average education levels of the congregation. Nobody could deny that there was a civilising aspect to such collective educational achievement. But I could never quite get past how much for them the education also became the means to wealth and property, the same way that once, simply by being male and in work, that gave my dad the sole right as a member of the family to own the property we lived in, as he started to own it. Relatively poorly educated that I was, my view of education was that whatever education might lead to access to, be short cut for, I liked it for how much it reversed the effects of how I had grown up with, where my family were so uninterested in any show of being educated it hurt, and they were proud of their lack of interest too.

In Lady Bay the people I knew sought comfort via being educated in the same way that my family had sought comfort through displays of ignorance that used to disturb me, and still did. The comfort of Lady Bay was the thing. In Lady Bay the new comfort I lived in helped me a lot, but exposed to me how uncomfortable the working class 'comfort' I had grown up with had actually been. My attempts at 'catching up' via being self educated, however much they fitted Lady Bay better than Lincolnshire, were mostly failures. They did not unpick why I was uncomfortable with how I had grown up. Though they were sometimes pleasing enough distractions.

Reflecting on Graham's sense of universal certainty I decided that the simplest New Year resolutions were the best. I would keep my hair short but regrow my beard. It was not much to aspire to, but I was living within my means when I committed myself to doing that. So new year, new beard. At all cost I had to put up with the itch as the new beard grew out. A beard is for life, not for Christmas.

Please left click here for Chapter Thirty Two.