Drop, drop, slow tears
APART from boring your friends about the birdsong that your Merlin app has identified, and lying awake for hours every night listening to audiobooks, is this another marker of growing old? At some point in every church service I now go to, I usually have to stop singing a hymn in mid-verse because I find it so moving that I’m pretty well in tears.
A recent example was at the evening patronal-festival eucharist at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street. The choir, including my husband, Michael, recessed at the end of the splendid service to a wholehearted rendition of “How shall I sing that Majesty”. Afterwards, he and I agreed that we’d both had to stop singing when we saw the lines “Thou art a sea with a shore A sun without a sphere” approaching, for fear of breaking into sobs.
I thought you were meant to cry less as you became more mature. The opposite seems to be the case. The more you know about life’s random ecstasies and tragedies, the more a piercingly good hymn line can stop you in your tracks.
“The fact that we’re almost in tears is a sign that it must be true!” I said. By “it”, I meant the existence of God and the truth of the Christian story. Michael, who’s even more of a doubter than I am, said: “It might just be a sign that we yearn for it to be true.”
As the granddaughter of the author of “Lord of all hopefulness”, sung at every family wedding and funeral I’ve ever been to, I’m used to having to stop suddenly at line three of the third verse: “Be there at our homing. . .”
It’s that word “homing” that does it: the gerund that Jan Struther chose to epitomise “the eve of the day” (and the autumn of life). I simply can’t sing it.
Both mortal and visible
THE only thing that marred the service in Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, was that the woman next to me was texting on her phone throughout. What do you do when this happens? It’s deeply distracting, and de-spiritualises the moment.
I felt that I couldn’t nudge her with my elbow. She might hate me, and that would escalate the de-spiritualisation. So I held my right hand vertically against the side of my face, so I couldn’t see her phone. She didn’t notice. Then I held up the Order of Service in that same position. Nothing would stop her.
A very bad example is being set in this regard by the otherwise wonderful Westminster Abbey, where (in what must be a post-pandemic, money-saving measure), you now have to follow the order of service on your phone, after holding it against a QR code at the entrance. The line-up of small gleaming screens along the pews and rows of chairs is a wrecker of the numinous.
A Mass of blessings
AFTER the birth of baby number three, I went into the writing doldrums for a few years. I had hardly any work at all. The loyal editors whom I’d written for had faded away or lost their jobs, and I had no one to whose coat-tails I could cling, to keep the journalistic career going. It was horrible.
Then I wrote a small book, Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School, about a Roman Catholic boys’ prep school, and dared to send a few chapters to Gail Pirkis, who runs Slightly Foxed. She offered to publish it as one of their beautiful Slightly Foxed Editions. And I was back — for which I’m eternally grateful. They went on to publish Terms & Conditions, about life in girls’ boarding schools in the 20th century.
This autumn, they’re going to publish my debut work of fiction: a novella set in an affluent Church of England parish on the western edge of London. It’s called Love Divine. (Now, there’s a good hymn.)
The novella, whose events take place over a single year within a two-mile radius, is a bit Barbara Pym-ish, perhaps — except that no one is in love with the vicar. There isn’t a vicar. It’s set during an interregnum. It’s not excessively churchy. The love is divine. I hope you enjoy it.
Ash cash
RESEARCHING my next book, about baptisms, weddings, and funerals, and how they’ve evolved over the past 50 years (please get in touch at ysenda@talk21.com to tell me your stories), has revealed the alarming fact that 20 per cent of British people are now choosing “direct cremations”: no ceremony; no one attending; body taken straight to centralised crematorium to be incinerated; family doesn’t even know when it’s happening; ashes returned by courier within 14 days.
The advertisements put out by direct-cremation firms always focus on the canapés. Instead of having to cope with the sadness and expense of a funeral, your descendants can splash out on a party with smoked-salmon blinis. “My family certainly knows how to party!” one man says in the Pure Cremations ad, who’s just signed up for the £1995 package.
This seems to me a bleak trend. Direct cremation is cheap, but not as cheap as it should be, considering the mere waste-disposal logistics operation it is. I can see why people are choosing it. A full funeral, with undertakers, hearse, flowers, choir, organist, and party afterwards, now costs up to £10,000. But to avoid facing the coffin is surely to avoid an essential part of the grieving process.
Love at first flight
A FRIEND’s daughter is getting married in the south of France in August. She and her daughter are trying to work out how to get the beautiful wedding dress, which must not be folded, to the south of France in readiness.
The bride’s father could drive it down in the car — but that would mean having to take two extra days of his scant holiday leave from the office. So they’re considering flying it down — but how to do so without folding it? The good news is that you can book an airline seat for your wedding dress, by ringing British Airways. The dress can sit next to you on the flight.
Thinking about this as I went to sleep, I wondered whether the dress, having paid for the seat, would be allowed an in-flight meal. Then I realised that you’d only get a meal in first class; so fretted over whether, if you were travelling first class, you would stump up for a first-class seat for the wedding dress as well, or would you make it travel in economy? If you did that, the dress would be on its own, and the person next to it might spill his Diet Coke over it.
Ysenda Maxtone Graham is an author and journalist.