Prophets of doom
NEVER ask a novelist, “What’s the worst that can happen?” We will improvise escalating levels of personal catastrophe which culminate in Armageddon and game over for the human race, when all you are doing is thinking aloud about the Gousto box arriving while you are out.
With our ridiculously over-trained imaginations, novelists make Chicken Licken look like a happy-go-lucky optimist. Being proved wrong doesn’t help us. Just because it was an acorn landing on our heads this time doesn’t mean it won’t be the sky falling tomorrow. Or a fox eating us — which, NB, is what happened to Chicken Licken. Who’s laughing now, eh?
I admit to channelling Chicken Licken as we emerged into a world of no Covid restrictions. In September, I attended a long-deferred banquet at which everything conspired to make me feel as though we were on the deck of the Titanic. Everyone so happy! Little string quartets playing! Dramatic irony! But, as days and then weeks went by, this proved not to be the superspreader event that I had doomily predicted. Aha! But let’s wait and see what happens when schools, colleges, and universities go back.
Well, we are back teaching on campus at Manchester Met, and tens of thousands of students have returned to the city. I was sure we’d all be going down like skittles. For a few weeks, when that didn’t happen, I began to unclench, but now, as we approach half-term, the signs are starting to look ominous. See? says Chicken Licken. Just wait and see what happens in winter, when seasonal flu arrives.
Aide-memoire
THESE have been anxious times, to say the least. It’s not surprising if the architecture of our brains has altered to reflect this. I was recently reading Psalm 106: “In Egypt they did not consider your wonders, nor remember the abundance of your faithful love; they rebelled against the Most High at the Red Sea.”
I caught myself thinking, Come on! They were trapped, with the entire Egyptian army descending on them. That’s the kind of emergency that tends to delete all previous happy outcomes from your head. There’s not much leisure for considering God’s wonders in a crisis.
Maybe it’s like swimming. I learnt to swim at primary school, but, if I fell out of a boat one day, would I remember not to panic? Would I make it to the shore? Unclear. Swimming unexpectedly in icy water with all your clothes on is very different from floating in a warm swimming pool on holiday. This is why I wear a life vest when I go kayaking. It makes sense to take precautions, master the skills, keep practising.
By analogy, if I consider the wonders of God when I have time and space, then maybe a moment will open out in the middle of the next crisis, a small space in which I can remember the abundance of God’s faithful love and not give way to panic.
Holding fast
I NOTICED in the first lockdown that my stress was written physically on my body. Even when I wasn’t consciously worrying, my shoulders were tense. I lay awake at 3 a.m. and realised that my fists were clenched. Unclenching them lasted only a minute or two. Well, if this is how it is, I thought, I may as well be clutching something concrete.
So, for the past 18 months, I’ve fallen asleep (or lain awake) with an olive-wood holding cross in my fist. You may use this as a sermon illustration. You’re welcome. You may also like to sing with me: “I will cling to the old rugged cross (rugged cross), And exchange it at last for a crown.”
Letting go
I DON’T have a crown, but I do have a rather lovely jewelled tiara, which I sometimes wear in the Manchester Writing School office, if I need to remind my colleagues that I’m the academic director, and they need to stop taking the mickey.
I tried it on again in early September, after a year of working from home. It doesn’t fit. I have to keep my head very still, or the tiara slides off and crashes on to my keyboard, accidentally firing off an expletive to some random prof., via Teams chat. Uneasy lies the head that wears the tiara, as C. S. Lewis says, or quite possibly St Augustine, or John Wesley. These are the names most likely to crop up in talks and sermons.
I’m sometimes struck by the fact that, although we have an eye on inclusivity when arranging events these days — an all-male, all-white line-up looks increasingly outmoded — it is still mainly white male authorities who tend to get referred to from the platform. I say this to myself as well, with my sparkly tiara precariously balanced.
“So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross (rugged cross), Till my trophies at last I lay down.” I am here to tell you that you probably won’t achieve very much, or enjoy life, if you’re worried about losing your ill-fitting tiara. For tiara, substitute as appropriate from the drop-down menu (you may tick more than one box): dignity, perfectionism, conflict-avoidance, pedantry, constant vigilance about what people might think of you, constant patrolling of other people’s soundness, the need to be right about everything, people-pleasing, trying to hold everything together, your important job as self-appointed gadfly to the C of E, other (please specify).
One day, we will be casting down our golden crowns around the glassy sea; so we may as well have fun and get in a spot of tiara-Frisbee now.
Catherine Fox is an author, senior lecturer, and Academic Director of the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.