Mother's Day

It was Mother's Day yesterday. A bit strange, that. I feel like it should be May. The fact that it has been the most absolutely un-typically British weather for the last seven days also assists in the illusion- unbroken brilliant sun and warm breezes. The crocuses and daffodils and primroses are up, the birds are singing very loudly, the chestnuts are bringing forth sticky buds, and this part of the world in general is lifting up its metaphorical head and remembering that the universe was not always composed of sleet and grey mist.
It is lovely. Lovely, lovely.
This Sunday night was The Carpenter's Arms - a supper that St Luke's Church puts on for the homeless every month. It was terribly excellent; we had roast chicken and Yorkshire puddings (the English have a curious outlook on the appropriateness of certain foods with certain meats. For instance, I always thought that it was impossible to have Yorkshire pudding with anything but roast beef, while mashed potatoes were suitable for any meal. This, I am informed, is not the case! Puddings go with anything, but the only proper thing to eat with chicken is roast potatoes. There, my philistinic culinary prejudices have been corrected, Thank Goodness!) and a nice bit of worship music and a little talk. Previously, I have just sat and visited with the people who come, but this time I got conscripted into the washing-up pit, and spent a very satisfying hour scrubbing the remains of apple tart off various pie pans that the ladies of the parish had brought in. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Sometimes, one cannot beat a good bit of hard scrubbing to any amount of metaphysical evangelism.

Photographs

A grey squirrel. Slightly larger than the red squirrel, it has almost entirely irradicated the native species. I have an ambition to see a red squirrel before I leave.

The Peace Statue covered in snow. The peace statue is one of my favourite Brightonian things.

Snow on the seafront.

Trees in West Sussex, near Haywards Heath.

This is Matthew, the three-year old son of the family I am staying with. He is hiding in my clothes rack.

This is Becky, the two-year old daughter of the people I am living with. She is very lovely.

This is the view along the beach in the early morning when I go for a walk.

Snow!

We had snow yesterday morning! Wonderful stuff; sticky and clean and absolutely perfect for snowballing. I was up before the two little ones in my family, so I threw snowballs at their windows until they came to look. I believe they were a little perplexed; they hadn't seen snow to remember before. It would be a bit alien-seeming to have a white, cold and wet blanket spontaneously drape everything in sight. It was my first snow this winter, and even if it was gone by lunchtime, it was rather nice to smell snow in the air. It hadn't really felt like Christmas was complete until then. The homeless have been struggling with the cold these last few weeks; and I am becoming more and more amazed at the seemingly superhuman survival of roughsleepers in Canada during minus 30 or minus 40 degree cold snaps after seeing what a struggle it is to stay alive for a windy night of minus 1 or 2. When I tell them how cold it is in Edmonton right now, they refuse to believe it, never mind the fact that we can have any homeless people at all. They say that they must have all died off in previous winters, or given up tramping entirely. The English also do not know, it seems, about triple-glazed windows, storm doors, or even (in my opinion) decent insulation. Thus you are unable to escape from the cold completely; it follows you wherever you go. I seem to have a draft that haunts me like a personal poltergeist from the moment I wake up until I crawl under my frigid covers that night. And so now I understand - and participate in - the national love of a good mug of tea to wrap your hands around. It is not only an addiction and a sacred social convention, it is a defensive weapon in the ever-raging war between the elements of wind, rain and sleet, and that of humanity and all that it stands for. In this sense (and in many others) a cup of tea is the symbol of culture, and the apex of civilization.

And Here She Is.

Violet Is Coming!

Adriel is having her daughter Violet even as I speak!
This is terribly exciting for me. The last time that someone was having a child in my immediate circle I was five and not alerted to the fact until all the exciting bits were over... Nor would I have understood them if they had been, in all fairness. I did get a lot of cheap comes-with-the-bouquet candy on the next day, though, which I probably won't get this time round. Hmmm.
Now the question is - what clever, endearing, sentimental and meaningful, yet inexpensive gift should I get little Violet Joy - of weight and time yet unknown - when she is finally cut free, wiped off and breathing air? Something, perhaps, that aludes playfully to her name? Or maybe something supremely practical (like wiping clothes), would bespeak my sympathy and understanding better?
I really should have worked this out a while ago.
This is really ridiculously exciting.

American Thanksgiving.

Joel and Adriel are Americans.

So every year, they invite all their English friends and any Americans who are missing home to an absolutely massive Thanksgiving feast on American Thanksgiving. There was turkey, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, stuffing, pumpkin pie (a phenomenon not heard of in Britain; everyone raved about the exotic dessert!), and lots of cornbread and gravy.

But since thirty people had to be fed, Joel and Adriel have been working for a week or more to get all the food prepped. We made seven pies - I got to do the part when you hold the pie in the air, and then run a knife around the edge to cut all the extra pastry off, which was very fun. Joel put the two monstrous turkeys in vats to soak in a special brine overnight to made them uber-moist and flavourful. And Adriel made a sweet potatoe casserole with marshmallows on top, which I told her was weird, but she said -'No, it's not weird, it's different. You are the foreigner here, my girl.'. My job was mostly goforing - I would go for any thing that they needed from the store, which proved challenging sometimes; my search for cornmeal finally took me to a speciality Indian food mart.

Most of the prep work was done at Joel and Adriel's flat, but the actual meal was going to be served at St Lukes, the church that we attend. St Lukes is up a very big hill. Lugging large amounts of carbohydrates up a hill is almost a legimate excuse for eating excessive amounts of carbohydrates. Almost.

But the meal was so worth it! We ate in the sanctuary of this beautiful old church lit only with candles. A lot of the people who came were not Christians; you could tell when they came in they were a little freaked out by the fact that they were in a church, but as the evening progressed, they relaxed and opened up in the warm atmosphere. That was lovely to see.

Joel and Adriel very specifically planned this as not only a time of fellowship, but of outreach. The popular conception of the Church is that it is a club of supercilious hypocrites who condemn and hate anyone opposed to them, and many people in this city have been hurt personaly in their experience of the church. So the fact that we - an oddly assorted mix of missionaries, agnostics, homosexuals, and christians and hedonists - enjoyed a lovely meal and shared jokes and anecdotes and good fellowship in the sanctuary of a church for hours and hours was a wonderful and marvellous thing, that I am convinced only God could bring about.

One of the things that Brighton needs most is unity; most of the churches don't do a lot of things together, and most view the others suspiciously. The same may be said of the people of Brighon, so this meal was especially apropos.

It was a wonderful night. But I don't think that I am tempted to start celebrating American Thanksgiving in Canada; two turkeys in one month are too much for me.

Now, the dishes are still to be reckoned with...

Gnome Culling

Today, while I was at the homeless drop-in centre called Off The Fence, just chatting and getting to know the chaps there, I met a gentleman named Steve, who is a volunteer there, and he told me about an interesting (and in my opinion, brilliant) tradition that he and his family have;

On Boxing Day in England, instead of going on a spending rampage, most people go on a killing spree. It is traditional to go fox hunting, fishing or shooting upon the day after Christmas.

It was not explained to me why this is, but really, do we need a logical reason to have a tradition?

But instead of a pheasant killing, Steve has something he calls A Gnome Culling.

In the months proceeding Christmas, he obtains as many ugly and tasteless pieces of decorative frangible - of which category the common garden gnome is a prime example - anything that unites dripping sentimentality with an obvious urgency on the part of the maker to make it as cheaply as possible within a minimum expenditure of time (in Steve's words, "An insult, a burden, and a source of legitimate rage to any intelligent individual.") - so that he can administer a small amount of cleansing to this old world by dispatching them in his back garden, with his pellet gun, on the twenty-sixth of December.

I must add that I have every intention of establishing a Canadian chapter of this tradition in my own family when I return.

Steve is a wonderful man - one of the many lovely people that I am meeting in this job. He taught me to play chess last Friday, and was so concerned that I learn the gambits, that he accidentally let me win...twice.