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October 2010
Stephen Fry and Alastair Campbell tweet and retweet a project, See the Difference, an experiment to restore the much lamented Elm to our landscape. The aim is to plant up to 250 a time, with the aim of planting 6,000 across the UK. It just costs £20 to take part. When we came back from the West Indies in late 1960s after my father finished his missionary service, we moved in with my grandmother, Sybil Rathbone, in her large house in Pulborough, Sussex. In Jamaica I was a minority in a school where most of the children were black. In Pulborough I went to the little school opposite my grandmother's, now a house, where I was bullied mercilessly for a Jamaican patois and where I struggled to get used to being surrounded by so many white children. I felt ethnically black inside, still do in some ways, and not for another three years, at a comprehensive in Staffordshire, did I find another black child to befriend. Our grandmother's house was called The Elms, and there lots of them framing the lawned grounds of this beautiful, ivy-covered Victorian rambling pile with orchard and crazy attics and catacombish cellars. Soon after, we left for a new ministry in the Midlands, the trees went also, destroyed by the fungal Dutch Elm Disease. Then the house went, destroyed by rot and ivy. Today, in our beautiful avenue in Kew, leaves on the Horse Chestnuts have turned brown early. The leaves are shrivelling into spotted grimy brown ash papers instead of the usual glorious golden russet, and the conkers are falling like tears to the ground. These trees are also being ravaged by fungus. I'm told it's not fatal. I bet that's not much comfort to the poor trees though.

One of the best decisions we ever made was to move our son from the local state Church of England school to a little private school. The state school is excellent, one of the best in the country in fact, especially for children that are particularly gifted, or particularly disruptive. Our son loves his new school. This term they are doing the  Vikings. I am doing them with him. I learn that the Vikings ate mashed up and cooked Elm bark as a matter of first and second courses. We take this opportunity to read Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. It feels oddly as if we are also paying for the education I failed to receive in our state system after moving back to Britain. I do believe I passed at least one A level, General Studies (B), on what I learned before the age of 11 in the traditional Victorian English-style schools in Jamaica and Barbados. I still can't talk 'properly' though and Arthur corrects my pronunciation regularly. 'It's bearwolf not beowulf.'  In the opening lines we read:

'And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line. Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.'


What Arthur and his friends love most about the Vikings are their fighting skills. His passion at the moment is wrestling. As I wrote last time, we've been introduced to World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE, a sort of Viking mythology for the modern age. A little bit of research has elicited the interesting fact that WWE, based in the US of course, has a massive schools reading programme, called the WWE Reading Challenge. Jack Swagger has recommended the adventure novel Redwall and the female star Natalya has, astonishingly, recommended The Alchemist by Paul Coelho. I've recently started following Coelho's blog, finding it useful in its advice for living life by spiritual principles. This week he writes, on Harry Potter and Dumbledore: 'It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live. The trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.' My husband and I have made a significant choice this week. We have decided to join the Labour Party. My dream has always been to be Conservative. Many of my Rathbone forbears were Liberal MPs in Liverpool and North Wales or in the case of Eleanor, Independent. Apart from a year as a card carrying Labour Party member as a student in Islington, though, and flirting with the Conservative Christian Fellowship a few years ago, I've not been a member of a party since and have been one of those 'floating voters' who is meant to determine elections except I always seem to vote for the losers. This time, although Labour will certainly never win in Richmond, it feels as though, at last, I've remembered how to live.



September 2010
There is another religion in our house at the moment, and it has little to do with faith unless you count the English blond boy called Christian who if his minders ever respond my interview request I will ask if he is indeed one. This is WWE. World Wrestling Entertainment. If any readers here have boy children aged between 8 and 80, you will know instantly what I am referring to. If you don't, think Giant Haystacks with muscle, fake tan and tight pants dotted all over with sparkling crytals. Very tight pants. Think non-stop Sky Sports, think mortgage-bending Rey Mysterio masks and think Butlins on a rainy, windy Saturday afternoon when you're meant to be writing about the Pope, and you'll pretty much get the picture. With ringside seats, seven-foot Big Show pounding around the ring and then being pounded into a pulp by Kane, it is difficult not to drawn into the excitement of this largely-bloodless violence. Our son gives us a running commentary on the 'finishers' of different wrestlers. He knows who is next in the ring when the first note of each man or woman's (yes there are women) theme tune strikes up. Earlier that day, something went wrong with iMovie my Mac and days of video disappeared. I long for a few seconds to be one of those female wrestlers, protected by the ropes from the crowds and pulling punches. I want to be Jacob. I want to wrestle with angels. I'm fed up with feeling like Job. Reporting religious affairs can sometimes be just a bit too rough.