Moonrise and blossom

It’s the same moon all over the world, as the saying goes: but context is all. As the half moon rose this afternoon, it seemed to pass through the branches of our little cherry tree, whose blossom is now scattering across the sky like confetti with every gust of wind. Not for the first time, I wished that I could write Haiku.

 

 

 

You might enjoy Conifers for moongazers or Ariel’s song.

Good weather and the Scottish character

Calvinism has a lot to answer for. As Scotland’s glorious spell of record-breaking warm weather draws to a close – sleet is forecast for us at the weekend – I have been noticing how many of us are miserable about the sunshine. That is to say, our instinctive reaction to unexpected good fortune is to assume that it will be counter-balanced by worse to come. It’s as if we dare not simply enjoy the moment for fear of being punished for it later, whether by sleet or by hellfire.

I am as guilty as anyone of this national trait.

‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ beamed a delivery driver on Monday, as he dropped off my groceries.

‘Wonderful,’ I replied. ‘I just hope that this isn’t all the summer we’ll get this year.’

As I heard what I was saying, I could have kicked myself for being so negative. My husband, a sunny optimist, is driven to distraction by my ability to see the downside in everything. (So at least he proves that not every Scot is a pessimist.) I would love to share his can-do attitude to life, but this native caution is too strong to shake off.

the horse chestnut this morning

In the play-park yesterday after school, a friend came over to sit in the shade with me as the children played.

‘It’s too hot in the sun!’ she exclaimed. (Yesterday it reached 23.6 degrees C or 74.5 F in Scotland, the hottest day on record for March, I believe.) We laughed about how we each worried that the rest of the year would be a washout, and how that attitude is so typically Scottish. Just then another mum greeted us.

‘Lovely, isn’t it. I just hope this isn’t the only summer we’ll get this year!’ she grimaced as she walked past, while we tried to suppress our chuckles.

Forsythia against the bluest sky

 

All this determined pessimism in the face of good fortune reminds me of a poem which perfectly encapsulates this aspect of the Scottish character. It’s by Alastair Reid, and is perhaps his best known poem. In fact, on awarding Reid an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of St. Andrews last year, Prof. Robert Crawford noted that this poem, “originally entitled ‘St Andrews’ but retitled ‘Scotland’, has been anthologized so often that its restless author…subjected it to a public burning after reading it at the StAnza poetry festival some years ago.”

The author may be fed up with it, but we continue to cherish this poem for its bright beauty and its uncomfortable, but undeniable, truth. Ladies and gentleman, here is Scotland, and the character of the Scots.

 

‘Scotland’ by Alastair Reid

It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’

 

 

You might enjoy this post with a poem on trees by Philip Larkin, or another post which touches on the Scottish character, Hogmanay and after.

The Tuesday tree: cherry blossom time already

Despite my blogging rules being self-imposed, I always feel a bit guilty if I get to Tuesday and realise I haven’t written anything since the previous Tuesday. Lovely as trees are, it’s more interesting to intersperse them with other topics, I think.

So what I have been doing since last Tuesday? Well, thinking and reading a good deal about all sorts of things, but not managing to write them down. Also having a stinking cold and feeling a bit sorry for myself (boo). And planning for our upcoming holiday (hurray!). And above all, enjoying the weirdly, wonderfully, warm weather. In the past few days, in fact, it’s gone from being unseasonably warm to positively hot by Scottish standards.

On Sunday we had lunch in the garden and spent the whole afternoon enjoying the sunshine, as the thermometer hit 20 degrees C (68 F). Yesterday it reached 22 (71) in the afternoon. That’s warmer than some whole summers here! And it’s a record-breaker for March, when snow showers are more usual. Although, as friends on Facebook reminded me, heat and cold are relative: when I was crowing about our fabulous weather, a friend in Newfoundland told me gloomily that it was minus seven degrees C where he was, with more snow and ice forecast; whereas a cousin in Australia told me that he started feeling cold when the temperature dropped to twenty in the evening. I’m happy to be somewhere in the middle.

With this unaccustomed warmth, the spring flowers and leaves are busting out all over. March is more green than I can ever remember, with larch, limes, sycamore and notafagi beginning to leaf a month earlier than usual. And best of all, the cherry trees are in bloom. That little one that began flowering at New Year is still managing to push out a few flowers amongst its new leaves. This week, the others have caught up and are looking delicious in their full flush of beauty. Enjoy.

Last year the cherry blossom came in April, coinciding with other reflections: see Cherry blossom;

and also with a visit to the city of York: see Oh to be in England, now that April’s there.

The Tuesday tree: horse chestnut coming into leaf

OK, so it’s not quite up to the Beeb’s time-lapse photography in Planet Earth, but here’s a little series of photos following the opening of a horse chestnut’s leaves. I hope that I never get blasé about Spring’s annual miracle.

28th February:

5th March:

13th March:

16th March:

20th March:

Like so many others, I’ve been noticing how early spring has come this year in Scotland, where we never had a really cold snap at all this winter. Conditions over the past season could hardly have been more different from the previous two years, when the exceptionally cold winter of 2009/10 seemed to merge into the exceptionally snowy winter of 2010/11, making spring later than usual, particularly in 2010. Just to show you, here are the buds on this same horse chestnut at the end of the first week of April 2010:

and on 22nd March 2011:

This year, for the first time that I can remember, the horse chestnut is already covered in green leaflets, blowing about in the breeze of the Spring Equinox.

For comparison, you might enjoy Can we pretend it’s Tuesday already? from 2010 and First green of the year from 2011.

Just walking the dog

Did someone mention the ‘w’ word?

Come on, Mum, how long does it take to get your coat and boots on!

Let’s go down the steps.

(Mum stops to admire the rhododendrons: I can’t believe they are flowering in mid-March.)

(And the Rh. barbatum, which this time last year was looking spectacular blooming in the snow, has almost finished flowering already.)

Lots of lovely smells to explore on the path beside the burn.

In fact, while Mum’s stopped to listen to the bubbling cries of the curlews, which we have just started hearing again in the field beside the river, I think I might go into the burn to investigate.

Where next?

Up this mossy bank: there are lots of rabbit holes to explore, and usually some pheasants to flush, and maybe a roe deer or two if I’m lucky!

(Meanwhile, Mum is enjoying the daffodils under the trees, and the green spring grass, and the wild mallard on the lochan, and the birdsong filling the woods.)

Nearly home, Mum!

OK, that’s enough photographs of me please. You know it makes me self-conscious.

No, really, enough now.

Home again…

…and time for a well-earned snooze.

Of course, some people think it’s always time for a snooze..!

(Dedicated to my best-beloved spaniel, who has been sitting on my lap supervising the ghost-writing of this post.)

Last year I wrote about today, Laetare Sunday and Mothering Sunday, in A rose-tinted Sunday.

Action movies are bad for your health – and other neurological discoveries

 Well, I bet you never thought that Arnold Schwarzenegger would get a mention in Dancing Beastie. The time has come to confess: The Terminator and Terminator 2 are amongst my all-time top movies. For those of you who are not familiar with them, I can tell you that they are not at all what you’d expect from a girl who writes about the beauty of trees and whose other favourite films include A Room with a View, Chariots of Fire and The Young Victoria.

compare and contrast:

Nonetheless, the dark, dystopian fable conjured by James Cameron in the first two Terminator movies still grips me, even if my attitudes have evolved since I first saw them as a student. (The casual violence disturbs me more now, and in the heroine, Sarah Connor, I see less the awe-inspiring feminist icon who thrilled me in my twenties, more a deeply damaged woman whose take on motherhood is deeply damaging her child.) So it was inevitable that I would eventually get round to watching the two follow-up movies in the Terminator franchise, despite misgivings about sequels written by committee. Our big Friday-night-in DVD last week, then, was Terminator: Salvation.

This is not going to develop into a movie review. Suffice it to say that I’d rather be out hugging trees any day than waste another couple of hours on such turgid and humourless rubbish. As a faithful fan of the original films, though, I had to see how the story panned out, so I sat through to the end. Or rather, I tried to. It gradually became clear, however, that science-fiction action movies are not designed for people with brain injuries.

There seems to be a rule that films of this type are mostly set at night, with the action lit by explosions and flashing lights. As someone who, since my accident, is made nauseous and panicky by stimuli as minor as a flickering cash machine screen or a news report with flash photography, I found the film increasingly uncomfortable. The climactic set-piece of the movie, which seemed to last about 20 minutes or more, was set (aren’t they always?) in some kind of dark factory with red alarm lights flashing constantly and white strobes and explosions being used more or less for the sake of it. This got harder and harder to watch – and not just because I thought it was a bad movie. Anyone might find this sort of lighting rather unpleasant on the eyes, I know, but it’s much more than that for me.

I find it very hard to describe how sustained flashing light makes me feel. Here is an attempt. A sort of pressure seems to build up in my chest and my brain. I feel slightly nauseous and sort of dizzy, disorientated. My heart rate rises, I feel anxious, almost panicky. Watching with one eye shut, or through one eye with my fingers latticed in front of my face, doesn’t help, as I discovered. In this particular movie, the final straw was a scene in which one of our heroes sees a flashback of his life history on a computer. Images flash onto the screen faster and faster, merging into each other, to give the impression of the vast amount of complex information which his (machine-made) brain is syncing from the main computer. My own (home-grown) brain couldn’t cope with this at all. I felt panicked, dizzy and overwhelmed. It felt as if something in my head was building up and was about to burst. I tried to ask to stop the film so that I could take time out, but was stuttering so badly (another consequence of brain injury, triggered by stress or exhaustion) that it came out as ‘C-c-can you p-p-pau-pau-pause the film…’. When it was stopped, I got unsteadily to my feet and reeled out of the room. I sat down in the bathroom and tried to calm my breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Steady, steady. My brain felt as if someone had lit fireworks in it. I shut my eyes, blocking out visual stimuli, trying to damp down the panic and the sparking in my brain. Would it help to be sick? I didn’t know how to release the horrible feeling of pressure. I found myself crying a bit, shaky sobs. Calm, calm. Deep breaths.

The last time that a movie made my brain feel so hyper-stimulated was two years ago, a fortnight after the accident which caused my injury. That was the first time since the accident that I had been able to watch the moving images of television at all, and was the last time I tried for several more weeks. I didn’t know that I could still be so badly affected. Despite knowing that flash photography is a real problem, the strength of my reaction to the stimuli in this movie took me entirely by surprise. If there is a moral to the story, dear reader, it would seem to be that action movies are bad for your mental health. In more ways than one, I’d say, but that’s another thread.

Ultimately it’s no more than a mild inconvenience to me if I can’t watch action/ sci-fi movies. Much as I once loved certain examples of the genre, I think I have largely grown away from them these days. (Well, OK, I’d miss being able to watch my other favourite feminist icon, Ripley in Alien.) It occurred to me the morning after this minor fiasco, however, that the statistics on traumatic brain injury show that the majority of victims are young men. According to Headway, the Brain Injury organisation, ‘Men are two to three times more likely to have a traumatic brain injury than women. This increases to five times more likely in the 15-29 age range’. In other words, brain injury overwhelmingly affects exactly the demographic at which action movies are targeted. I feel sorry for the lads who can’t watch their favourite films any more because the visual effects trigger at best a feeling of panic and nausea, at worst perhaps an epileptic fit. A mild brain injury can have effects on your life that you would never have thought of.

Trees are far better for your health than action movies

This would have been the end of the story, were it not for a meeting I had with my neurologist yesterday. (If you were looking for a post on trees rather than on Terminators, that’s what I was doing instead, I’m afraid.) It was the first time I’d seen him in several months, so there was a lot to discuss. We talked about my unabated feeling of sensory overload in busy places; how in the playpark with kids roaring about, or in a busy city with crowds and traffic, my anxiety levels shoot up. Anywhere where there is a lot of unpredictable movement and noise is enormously stressful: my heart rate increases, I feel defensive and anxious. It makes me want to get away and, if that is not possible, I get snappy with my children, frightened about how vulnerable they are. I never used to be like that before the accident. I know that I am over-reacting, but I can’t stop myself. This level of hyper-alertness leaves me completely drained afterwards too: a day negotiating my way around safe, civilised Edinburgh leaves me almost too tired to speak.

It seemed a separate issue to me when I raised the subject of my continuing difficulty with flashing lights, sudden loud noises and my extreme reaction to a movie. But at this point the neurologist suddenly leaned forward in his chair.

‘Have you had this problem with lights and noise ever since the accident?’ he asked. Oh yes. Then, ‘Can you remember the accident at all?’ Nope.

‘But your husband and other people saw it; they must have told you all about it?’ Yes. It’s odd: I can’t remember the actual accident, but my mind goes back to that scene, that day, all the time.

‘And how does that make you feel?’ Erm…well, how do you think, is what I didn’t say. ‘Do you find it upsetting?’ Well of course! I mean (gesturing around to the neurologist’s clinic, the hospital setting) here I am! Here I am, two years on from the accident, discussing my wonky brain instead of collecting my child from school.

I could almost see the light-bulb ping on over the doctor’s head. All these symptoms, he said, including the hyper-alertness, the fight-or-flight reaction, the feeling of vulnerability and over-protectiveness of myself and those I love, the extreme stress reaction to sudden light and noise: these are all classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

Somehow a bundle of random symptoms sounds so much more impressive when you put a fancy label on it. For a moment I had an image of myself with a big army helmet on, as a combat veteran.

‘I’m not saying that you have full-blown Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,’ added the neurologist. My camouflage kit evaporated. ‘But I am going to discuss your case, if I may,’ (he is such a lovely tactful doctor) with the neuropsychologists, and I will get back to you.’

What is exciting about this discovery/ diagnosis/ whatever you want to call it, is that post-traumatic stress is treatable. No wonder it made the doctor sit up. Some of my remaining challenges are the result of physical injury to the brain, he explained. Others, however, may be psychological, and there are various methods by which these can be alleviated, or even overcome for good.

And this is why I am taking time out from the beauty of trees to publicise another snippet of my medical history. Because if there should, by any chance, be anyone with a mild head injury who stumbles across this blog, and recognises these symptoms, then they might like to know that treatable post-traumatic stress is one possible diagnosis. With the appropriate care, those young lads might be able to watch their favourite action movies again after all. And so might I. Arnie: I’ll be back.

P.S. I apologise for the formatting glitches. They have defeated me!

Going off at a tangent (ho ho) today is Pi Day – so you might be interested in A piece of Pi for the innumerate.

The Tuesday tree: smocked sweet chestnut

There are two sweet chestnuts growing side by side in my favourite wood which have always given me pleasure. The first, because it seems to twist as it grows, thus appearing to be in perpetual energetic motion.

And the second, which grows straight up, because it has the most beautiful bark. The pattern on the bark suggests that it was pleated and has unfolded as it grew, like a concertina or an Elizabethan ruff.

Elizabeth I in a pleated ruff

See what I mean? Oh, and I think this tree has a tummy button too!

Alternatively, it makes me think of smocking, that ancient art of beautifying and strengthening clothing.

smocked viyella toddler's shirt.

I bought or inherited one or two precious little smocked romper suits and shirts for my children when they were babies. It was so sad when the boys grew out of them and into the mundane clothes suitable for nursery rough-and-tumble. Needless to say, I still have the smocked baby clothes, packed away in acid-free tissue paper in the hopes that future generations might still appreciate such treasures.

The baby clothes might be long put away, but the beautiful ‘smocked’ bark of this chestnut is there in the woods to enjoy on every walk.

 

You might enjoy Do the twist.

Spring is sprung!

'Sproinngg...' (Bouncing Rabbit tea towel by Ham, from www.athomer.co.uk)*

 

Ah yes, the annual Spring posts are beginning to return to the blogosphere, like swallows heralding summer. Scotland is seeing an earlier Spring than it has for several years, thanks to our mild winter. In the last week of February last year, the snowdrops last year were only just starting to bloom. This year, the snowdrops have pretty much been killed off by the past week’s unusually warm temperatures (15 degrees yesterday! That’s like July for some years here!). Since the snowdrops began flowering in the first week of January, though, it feels right for them to be giving way to the daffodils now.

Ah, the daffodils. Every year, I hope that there might be one in flower for St. David’s Day on the first of March; or at least one for the birthday of a Welsh friend on the fifth. Some years, there are only a handful by the middle of the month. This year, they began flowering in February, within the past week.

They are joined by crocuses which – for once – the pheasants and mice haven’t eaten. Isn’t this just one of the most cheering sights, the first bright colour of the year?

The green spring grass is coming up,

in the woods, the bluebell shoots are pushing up through last year’s leaf litter,

and the hardy young cherry tree which amazed us by flowering on New Year’s Day is still producing fresh blossoms.

 

 

In fact, I am noticing all the same signs of the world waking up that I brought to your attention last year, only three weeks earlier this time. (And last year’s Spring was about a fortnight earlier than 2010′s, so we are doing well.)

Horse Chestnut opening, 3 weeks earlier than 2011

 

Elder

 

Flowering currant, one of the best smells of Spring

There’s no doubt about it: whatever the weather may do in March, Spring has indubitably sprung.

 

 

(* I wrote this post in my favourite book shop cafe, The Watermill in Aberfeldy. Its companion homeware shop, Homer, is selling tea-towels with this very Spring-y bouncing rabbit design by Ham (www.hammade.com) as part of its new season range of goodies. No, they’re not sponsoring me: I just loved the rabbit!)

The Tuesday tree: a yew for artists and dreamers

Some of the strongest presences here at Castle Beastie are the yew trees. We have a large number of them, a few of which are thought to be as old as the castle, which would mean that they were planted in the fifteenth century. Planted closely in a long avenue, they reach up rather than outwards and have not grown particularly wide. The yews that are spaced further apart or singly, however, have had room to expand over the centuries. Their massive trunks look like ropes or snakes twined together: there is something sinuous, fluid and intensely alive about these trees. You can easily find faces in their twisted trunks, and imagine the Green Man looking down at you from the hairy boughs.

There is one in the garden that I particularly like. It is one of several which are believed to be survivors of the original planting of the walled garden in the seventeenth century. The Laird of the time had gone to university in Leiden, and returned to Scotland enthused by the latest Dutch fashions in formal gardens. One expert on historical gardens tells me that these yews were probably intended to be clipped topiary, either balls or cones. Over time, however, as fashions changed towards a more informal look, the regimented yews were allowed to grow out of their confines. Three and a half centuries later, they are the dominant feature of the garden: broad, twisting, many-limbed and mysterious. One could pass many hours drawing their infinite details, or just contemplating them and their slow, inscrutable history.

 

 

 

 

 

For a post about the fate of another yew here, see The Tuesday tree: yew.

If music be the food of faith, we’re starving here.

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, which is not a day that likes to draw attention to itself. Unlike the brashness of Mardi Gras/ Shrove Tuesday – all pancakes and parties – the first day of Lent is a time of quiet introspection. What’s been causing me to reflect on matters spiritual for the past few days, however, is not so much the beginning of Lent as the state of music in the Church.

For the past decade or so, I have been a pretty regular member of our local Catholic church. I was brought up and Confirmed as an Episcopalian, but choose to join my husband in his church; not least because we agreed to bring up our children in the Catholic faith. I have not converted to Catholicism. I often think it would be so much easier if I had, but you can’t convert just because it would be convenient. So I continue to be a sort of semi-detached member of our small congregation, warmly welcomed yet precluded, for sound theological reasons which I do understand, from participating fully in the Mass by taking Communion. (As a priest of the beau monde at the Brompton Oratory put it succinctly when I pushed him on this fundamental point, ‘Frankly, my dear, you’re just not in the club.’)

The sticking point: transubstantiation. (photo from michaelcmorris.blogspot.com)

Anyway, what this means is that I came to Catholic Sunday worship with a weight of Episcopalian assumptions. Several things struck me as a newcomer. Firstly, the many similarities in the liturgy of the two traditions: we are surely more similar than different. Secondly, the surprising plainness of the interiors of Catholic parish churches in Britain. I suppose I should not have been surprised, having written a thesis on the pre-Reformation Church in England: Anglicans (and Presbyterians in Scotland) took over all the beautiful medieval churches at the Reformation. Nevertheless, it seemed odd to me that most Catholic churches appear to have more in common with the sober, whitewashed simplicity of Presbyterian kirks than with the stained glass and ornately carved wood of traditional Anglican places of worship. Similarly, I was struck by the plain, even pedestrian, language of the liturgy: I miss the sonorous cadences of the Book of Common Prayer. Most of all, though, it was the state of the music that I noticed.

Coming from the Anglican tradition, the poverty of the music in the average Catholic service came as a shock. I grew up with the great, inspiring hymns of Charles Wesley and the evangelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: ‘Praise my soul the King of Heaven’; ‘For all the saints who from their labours rest’ (not forgetting the ‘bong’ before the first word); ‘Guide me O Thou great redeemer’ (Cwm Rhondda); the Battle Hymn of the Republic; ‘Eternal Father strong to save’; ‘He who would valiant be’ (which my father chose to be sung at his funeral); ‘The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended’; ‘and so on and so on. There are dozens and dozens of uplifting hymns for every occasion and mood. They are perhaps one of the great riches of the British Isles, if largely unrecognised: you only have to listen (pace my French cousins!) to a French congregation’s attempt at singing to realise how lucky we are in this country to have this strong tradition of congregational music.

In the Catholic churches I’ve attended in Britain, however, you would never know that any such repertoire existed. Some of those hymns, it is true, are to be found in the hymn books we use; yet they never seem to be chosen. Instead, we are asked to dredge up the energy to sing banal drivel like ‘Bind us together, Lord, bind us together with cords that cannot be broken. Bind us together, Lord, Bind us together, Lord, Bind us together in love.’ If you haven’t heard the pathetic excuse for a tune that goes with that, lucky you. The sentiment is all good, granted, but the sappy words and tunes are beyond awful. (No, go on, DB, tell us what you really think.)

I apologise for getting a bit het up about this, but the thing is, I really think it matters. Singing together is a wonderful way of building a sense of common cause, which is vital to a congregation. And singing as a form of praise should inspire, comfort and uplift, not drain you of the will to live. So why does the Catholic church turn its back upon the wealth of material available to it? My husband, being a Catholic, blames the Reformation and the consequent long break in the traditions of Catholicism in Britain. I, being a traditionalist, blame Vatican II, or rather the fact that this great reforming council of the Catholic Church took place in the Sixties, thus paving the way for a drippy army of sandal-wearing, guitar-wielding songsters. (Oh dear, now I’ve offended more good souls.) Before Vatican II, I suppose that there was no tradition of congregational singing in the Catholic Church, as the congregation was effectively only a spectator to the rite being performed by the priest. Would that be right? I can’t understand, however – or at least, I find it hard to sympathise with – the revitalised Church welcoming insipid little dirges for its people to sing every week, rather than taking the opportunity to adopt some of the great hymns of the English speaking tradition.

What I can understand is that the Catholic Church in Britain might have wanted to forge its own traditions after Vatican II, rather than taking on the music of Protestantism. In that case, however, why not make use of the sumptuous glories of Catholic music both post- and pre-Reformation: Mozart, Bach, Palestrina, Thomas Tallis? Most of this body of music, granted, is for choirs; but even our church choir in a large city congregation rarely tackled any such music, despite the fact that plenty of it is both manageable and immensely rewarding for an amateur choir. The result is that the entire congregation is impoverished, whether or not they are aware of it. Denying congregations the opportunity to hear good choral music or to sing stirring hymns is almost, to my mind, a sin, because such music does so much more for the spirit than guff like ‘Bind us together’.

The choir stalls in Exeter College Chapel, Oxford (photo from www.hoteldesigns.net)

This is, of course, a very subjective rant. And I am not a Catholic – sometimes I’m not even sure if I’m anything, though I’ll keep searching – so you could argue that I have no right to pontificate. Perhaps the importance I attach to the quality of music in worship is indicative of the weakness of my own faith, which needs all the support it can get. In church, I am constantly seeking that sense of the numinous, that awe-filled sense of the presence of the Divine. Personally, I find it in the soaring notes of sixteenth century polyphony. I do not find it, ever, in a modern, brightly-lit building with a group of people half-heartedly singing limp songs from the Seventies.

The point is, though, that I don’t believe I can be the only person who needs these ‘props’, if you will, to reach some spiritual communion. Many of the people in our rural Catholic congregation may never have had the opportunity to sing the hymns which I grew up with, or to experience the beauty of early Church music which I was lucky enough to hear and to sing at university. But that doesn’t mean that they might not benefit from it as much as I do. Maybe our parish can’t manage to put together a choir to sing ‘Spem in Alium‘, but we’d surely all get a filip from belting out the Old Hundredth, ‘All People that on Earth do dwell, sing to the Lord with cheerful voice’.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone has different experiences of music in Catholic churches in England or Scotland. (Of course, the great cathedrals and metropolitan churches are a different matter, having vastly richer resources to draw on than the little rural parishes.) Do most people prefer the modern songs, or is it just that they have never been offered an alternative? I guess that I have fairly old-fashioned preferences in worship. Is it only in the (several) parish churches which I have attended that these modern tunes are preferred, while there are congregations elsewhere singing more inspiring hymns? I just can’t help feeling that, for all the unflagging cheerfulness of our lovely priest and the warmth and friendliness of our congregation, there is something lacklustre, something joyless, at the heart of our worship. And I think music is the answer.

You might be interested to read A rose-tinted Sunday.