I have had this urge to be alone today, so after three girls got into a screaming match over the rumour of a mere possibility of a One Direction gig in this area within the coming year, I slipped away from the crowd with my trusty laptop and sought the silence and the peace.
Which is bloody hard to do because it is freezing outside, and the gazebo near the school where one can retreat and enjoy the majesty of the rolling landscape of this bit of Southern England was hounded by cold wind, rain and wet benches.
The library is closed today because the librarian is off on a course of some kind. He’s getting retrained he’s told me, and once the library is moved to the other school, he will become a digital curator responsible for the digital catalogues that will need to be in order for the system the school is planning.
Which means that my normal refuge when I want to get away from it all was barred for me, and that’s why I thought about the gazebo. But it too was barred from me, this time by the elements and the English weather. So, I ended up going down to the town – which is a bit ironic since I wanted to be alone.
Now I’m sitting at a café with a huge mug of tea, and enjoy the free Wi-Fi that comes with buying things here. The sweet life of finding silence and solitude in the middle of a crowd of people sitting at tables that are so close to each other that the neighbour hardly need to move to be able to read this over my shoulder.
***
Mum rang earlier and told me that she had arrived in Coventry safe and well, and she and Auntie had been out to the town she plans to move to. After praising the house, she launched into criticism of it. It sounds like it has plenty of character to fuel a long list of small annoyances for her.
I have never thought much about our house, but now that I do, there are quirks about it. Doors that are just askew enough so that you have to ram them shut if you want to close them. Little mysterious flaws; like the line of cracks in the room downstairs where Mark and his dad brew their beer. Or the mysteriously copious amount of times that the plug box down Ghost Girl’s flat downstairs trip and have to be reset.
These are little things that Mark’s dad always plans to investigate, but never do. These are little things that Mark mentions to his dad, and then nothing is ever done. It’s like everyone is used to having these flaws in a house and think that it’s part of having one. Like you’d be annoyed by having a train track next to your house for the first few weeks, and then you sleep through it when the freight trains move past at three in the morning.
The way mum went on about the house up in Warwickshire, it seems like it has as much ‘character’ as ours does. Even more so since it’s over one hundred years old while ours is from the 1960s. At least she was self-critical enough to recognise that she spent all her girl-hood trying to get out of the small village where they grew up, and now she’s moving back to another one. I fully expect her to take a seat on the Parish council.
She’ll be the female version of the Parish council chairman in ‘The Vicar of Dibley’. That would be so funny. When I told her this, she was annoyed with me, but I don’t care. Mum is atheist to the core, and would make a good Hitchens – if she could keep her temper in check when she met annoying prelates and born again believers.
***
Speaking of religion; I make myself impossible sometimes, and maybe I should be more political and diplomatic about the whole thing. There is no need for me to always protest about it, particularly when I’m not asked to participate.
There’s going to be a spring concert, like I did last year. I haven’t yet been asked to participate in it, but there was some lose talk about it, and one of the teachers said that the class should go to a service at the local church.
This I had to protest, since I don’t know why we should go there. The teacher was all about fuzzy stuff like being spiritual and what-not, and I’m afraid that political beast that I rarely vent here took over, and I protested the whole idea that there was something ‘warm and fuzzy and nice’ about going to Church.
I certainly wouldn’t participate in a service like that, and I’ll have no part of a school outing to go to one. They’ll have to drag me there, force me, and I’ll still whine and complain about it. Just because the rest of the world doesn’t think about what the substance of worship means doesn’t mean that I don’t. I’ll have no part of the wickedness going on there.
But I was never asked to go, never forced to participate. It’s voluntary, so my objections were all for nothing. So what if some of them go? What is it to me? It’s just that the assumption that nobody would mind is sometimes cloyingly annoying. As if there are no real reasons to object, and that those who object are being a bit unreasonable, or dogmatic.
***
That was another reason for the need to be alone because as usual nobody understands my objections. “It’s just a couple of hours, surely you can suffer that?” No. I can’t. I will have nothing to do with reinforcing a cultural norm that going to church is a part of daily life.
Not until the day that church stop telling me that I’m fundamentally sinful just for being what I am. I will not, never, acquiesce to that out of some sense of communitarian submission. Not until the day that the church stops saying that what I have with Mark is a danger, a threat to society at large.
Not until they unconditionally accept my love for that man. Then I might extend them an olive branch. Until then, they can go their way, and I’ll go mine. And whenever we cross paths they’ll not have one inch of submission and conciliation from me about things that I think are morally wrong, logically flawed, and intrinsically invalid.
Not one inch.
Your house sounds like ours. It always takes a little toying with the thermostat to bring the heat back up, and it decides on it’s own simply to stop several times a week. The repair man is lazy or an idiot, and the landlord doesn’t seem to know what to do.
And the church thing, I totally agree with you. However, Brian and I both went to church this Sunday morning together. It’s not a church my extended family would approve of, and that’s all the better. It’s Unitarian Universalist, and they honestly don’t care that I am an existential humanist. They just believe in peace and feeding the poor, making the world a better place. . . I can get behind something like that. And they are more than welcoming of gays. It’s hard not to go since a dear friend of mine, Ann, is the minister and they let Brian play their very antique, very expensive grand piano.
And not one word of silliness about damnation and brimstone is ever spoken. Complete heresy as far as my family is concerned.
They happen to be one of the few churches I am aware of that is actively participating in the long term recovery of Hurricane Sandy victims on Long Island. That’s the sort of thing they are about. I wouldn’t waste time in supporting any church that supports the lies, bigotry, discrimination and ignorance that is the history of those other places.
When I first came out in February of 1987 it was a Humanist Unitarian Universalist minister that helped me feel good about myself. I don’t attend church now but if I did it would be the local Unitarian Universalist Church. I have enormous respect for t hem. They were LGBT inclusive before most other now inclusive denominations. I remember they did a survey and 1/3 of the members of the UU Church I went to back in the ’80s and ’90s were Agnostic or Atheist. So I think it’s one church even Colin could take.
I agree with you about religion. Why do people always view the atheists as intolerant and the religious as being forgiving?
Here in the state of Michigan a native American tribe has voted to recognize and perform gay marriages. The state government was quick to proclaim that these marriages will not be recognized by the state. The native Americans are saying their religion has always accepted gay people. So the state is having no problem stepping all over one persons religion with the views of another’s religion. Where is the separation of church and state that religious people shout about whenever their is a hint of restricting their religious rights. Here we have a situation where one religion claims their religious rights are being trampled on if any gay people are allowed to get married yet they are willing to let another religions rights to get trampled on. Aren’t they being intolerant and dogmatic? I can accept them not performing gay marriages but why the incursion into others religious beliefs?
For me religion represents intolerance, bigotry, war, violence, ignorance, hypocrisy, etc.
When I was in school, my chorus class performed in churches a few times every year. Concerts that I got a grade on, in a public school. In the South, there is no separation of church from anything.
And yes, we adjust quickly to what we can’t change, particularly when we see it often. I lived next to the railroad for six years, and it never bothered my sleep. You just get used to saying, “Hang on a sec,” and holding the phone away from your ear when a train is passing, so the other person can hear what you live with.
Sometimes it’s easier to be alone in a crowd. No one seeks you out and tells you that you look lonely.
Every house is like that I guess. Mine has curtains in front of a self-closing door so that I have good chance of colliding with the door unknowingly when I am trying to barge in the room at full speed. BAM! My nose has swollen permanently as a result. A home is not home if it is living without its eccentricities, I guess.
And your observation about lonely people in a crowd is so spot on.
The only thing that would get me into a church, (other than Unitarian Universalist), would be great music. Unfortunately the great classical musicians and composers of past centuries found that the only way to support their art was to work for a church or some pseudo-pious rich man, (the same was true for great artists like Michelangelo). So great works were produced using what I treat as Xtian Mythology. So I can enjoy the music of Bach, Handel, Beethoven or Mozart no matter what the theme of the music is. After all I don’t have to literally believe the story of The Sorcerer’ s Apprentice to enjoy the music. Now, I do have more of a problem with contemporary Xtian music if I know it’s coming from homophobic musicians.