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Diary: Pat Ashworth

09 September 2022

ISTOCK

Sitting uncomfortably

A MANY-times-postponed trip to Connecticut culminates in a drive up to Cape Cod — for the British, a never-ending highway of confused geography, where the place names of Bristol, Oxford, Truro, Manchester, and Norwich remind me just why this is called New England.

On the island of Martha’s Vineyard, we happen on the iron-built Tabernacle, an outdoor, ecumenical, worship-and-concert space at the centre of an entire village of story-book Victorian cottages, as brightly coloured as American candy. I learn that the architectural style is Carpenter’s Gothic, which I can’t help thinking should more properly be a typeface.

The Tabernacle is part church, part arena, with capacity seating. But there is an anomaly in a section with row upon row of straight-backed, smooth-grained wooden chairs that transport me straight back to the Methodist chapel that I grew up in. We’ve done no homework for this visit, and, to my satisfaction, I learn that this place was a 19th-century “campground” for Methodists on retreat. Their aura and austerity remain, as clear as the polish on the seats.


Points of view

I AM in the United States in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the landmark legal ruling that gave American women the legal right to abortion (News, 1 July). In Provincetown, as liberal a town as you could find, the placards defending a woman’s right to choose remain.

We mull it over as we dine outdoors with friends. Marty, a Jewish lawyer, fears its demise curtails freedom of religion. He holds that the five conservative Christians on the Supreme Court that pronounced the opinion placed their personal Christian beliefs above those of other religions, and sees the US moving one more step away from being a non-sectarian, multi-ethnic nation, with consideration and protection for all religious beliefs.

Conservative Christian forces will prevail in almost all red states, he argues. The sun goes down, the fireflies dance, and we abandon the dining debris to retreat indoors. I reflect that travel does indeed broaden the mind, and the world outlook suddenly looks a little grim.


Beside the seaside

BUT, when I am back home, and escaping to Whitstable for the day from the rigours of the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, it looks wonderful from the top of a bus.

I get the front seat on the top deck, and it feels like being back on a school outing, when Barrie and his rebels elbowed their way to the back, and Janice and her gigglers danced their way to the front. And I remember bus duty as a secondary-school teacher, when the driver would dig his heels in and growl, “I’m not shifting till they’ve put the light bulbs back.”

As we go uphill, brushing the tops of the trees, it starts to feel like a runway. We might take off at any minute and rise above the Kent countryside. The garden of England should be green, but it’s parched and yellow, and the cattle lie still. The sea is blue, though, and the breakwaters are inviting. I dangle my feet in the water and think there is nothing nicer on earth.


University challenge

LIVING in student accommodation at the Conference has its challenges. We’re all assigned to different eating-places on the University of Kent campus, and mine is the student bar, where they cater for large appetites.

My ploughman’s comes with four slices of pork pie and four whopping pieces of Cheddar. I decide that sometimes I need to cater for myself, and I’ve noticed a very impressive kitchen opposite my room, complete with fridges, microwave ovens, and a toaster. So I do a hasty — and mostly carb-free — shop at the slimmed-down student Co-op, and look forward to the pleasures of my evening meal.

But there are no utensils. No pans, no dishes, no plates, no cutlery: the students have taken them all home. I have a mug, and a teaspoon. I become adept at buttering toast with a teaspoon; cutting up pineapple with a teaspoon; chopping tomatoes with a teaspoon. It becomes an exercise of ingenuity, a bit of bushcraft on the second floor. And I’m surely a little slimmer by the close of play.


New every morning

AS THE summer heatwaves recur, I resolve to adjust my day and to try and live more as they do in the countries of the Mediterranean. In the habit now of waking earlier, I take to walking in the deer park near by in the early morning, before the heat has taken a grip. Of the few people I pass, most are dog-walkers. It is calm and serene. The deer reach to the lower branches of the trees for sustenance, and take no notice of my presence.

In an upside to the restrictions of the pandemic, our local shops have thrived. We are back to some of the old ways: buying our bread fresh, and our fruit and vegetables loose. I discover, on the short drive home, what I have never known in the four decades I have lived here: that the butcher’s opens at 8 a.m., and so does the bakery. The two local stores have always opened at 7 a.m., and so the day ahead is cleared, if I so choose.

And there is something of the rhythm of the monasteries in rising earlier and going to bed earlier. They knew a thing or two in places like Rievaulx Abbey and Mount Grace Priory, where the essence of all of that lingers, and where they started and ended the day with praise.

Pat Ashworth is a journalist and playwright.

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