FINISHED READING - Leaving Alexandria by Richard Holloway

It was the writer and broadcaster Damian Barr that first alerted me to Richard Holloway. I watched a few interviews posted on You Tube and I found someone who said a lot of things that were very pertinent to the present state of my spiritual life and experience of it. Particularly the relationship between faith and doubt, our grasping for certainties where there may not be any, and the pain of parting from institutions you have grown to love, but need to leave none the less. All these issues resonated strongly.

Leaving Alexandria is both an autobiography and a meditation on the reoccuring themes that have emerged from Holloway reviewing his life. It takes you from his childhood in Alexandria near Glasgow to his resignation as Bishop of Edinburgh several decades later. Its subtitle A Memoir of Faith and Doubt, describes this probing vein of self questioning that runs through out this retelling of his life story. It is his frank honesty that is often the books most striking feature. He speaks quite plainly of his perceived short comings, his heart searching, the pleasures, enthusiasms and dilemmas of following a religious inclination.

At an early age of fourteen he decides to go to Kelham Hall, in Nottinghamshire. Then the headquarters and training college for The Society of the Sacred Mission. An Anglo-Catholic organisation dedicated to providing a spiritual voication for young men from underprivileged backgrounds. The young Holloway was inspired in a highly romanticised way by its idealism and rituals, but soon found himself floundering in the rather muddy waters if his burgeoning teenage libido. In the end he is forced to give up his Novitiate status.? But this was only the beginning of a lifetime of struggle between his ideals and the lived actuality.

His life subsequent to leaving Kelham Hall is plagued by regret and a sense of having fallen away from his rather exalted ideals. Everything he chooses to do infused with an air of imperfection, of not being quite good enough. Leaving Kelham Hall, was like his leaving of his family home in Alexandria, another example of his restless roaming spirit. He tried to quell what was essentially a self doubt that undermined  his efforts. Taking on challenges and positions because he thought they might in themselves deepen his faith, commitment and resolve. As a strategy this appears rarely to have worked.

Eventually he became Bishop of Edinburgh and a vocal champion of the ordination of women and challenging the churches views on homosexuality and gay clergy. Realising the two issues were linked because both unsettled the dominance of male power in the church and more widely in society. Though there was a growing unease at some of his pronouncements and the adverse publicity they caused, it was as nothing to what was to follow. Once he published a book Godless Morality-Keeping Religion out of Ethics. His position as Bishop became untenable and he had to resign.

Since then Holloway appears to have flourished as a writer and commentator. No longer feeling he has to tow a doctrinal line and present unquestionable certainties to a congregation. He remains 'comfortably uncomfortable sitting on the edge' Neither fully a believer nor a non believer. He has become more adept at faithfully travelling alongside his doubts. Not trying to force a resolution to them via theories or principles abstracted from lived experience. Fixed doctrinal certainties so easily leading, in his view, to cruelty and moral misjudgements.

I found this an inspiring and frequently poignant book, leaving me with much to ponder and reflect on.

 CARROT REVIEW - 7/8

QUOTATION MARKS 53 - The Way of Ignorance

This is an extract from Wendell Berry's excellent essay The Way of Ignorance. Its heavily edited, but it does give you a sense for how his mind first examines by noting all its constituent ideas, assumptions and what is missing or left out, before restoring them to a whole.

' Except to the arrogantly ignorant, ignorance is not a simple subject. It is perhaps as difficult for ignorance to be aware of itself as it is for awareness to be aware of itself....

There is, to begin with ,the kind of ignorance we may consider to be inherent...A part of our inherent ignorance, and surely a most formidable incumbrance to those who presume to know the future, is our ignorance of the past....

There are several other kinds of ignorance that are not inherent in our nature but come instead from weakness of character. Paramount among these is the wilful ignorance that refuses to honour as knowledge anything not subject to empirical proof. We could just as well call it materialist ignorance....this rejects useful knowledge such as traditions of imagination and religion, and so comes across as narrow mindedness.....To this kind of mind, there is no longer a legitimate wonder. Wonder has been replaced by a research agenda, which is still a world away from demonstrating the impropriety of wonder.

A related kind of ignorance, also self-induced, is moral ignorance, the invariable excuse of which is objectivity. One of the purposes of objectivity, in practice, is to avoid coming to a moral conclusion.

There is also ignorance as false confidence, or polymathic ignorance. This is the ignorance of people who know 'all about' history or its 'long term consequences' in the future...this is closely akin to self-righteous ignorance, which is the failure to know oneself. Ignorance of one's self and confident knowledge of the past and future often are the same thing.

Fearful ignorance is the opposite of confident ignorance. People keep themselves ignorant for fear of the strange or the different or the unknown, for fear of disproof or of unpleasant or tragic knowledge, for fear of stirring up suspicion and opposition, or for fear of fear itself....there is the related ignorance that comes from laziness, which is the fear of effort and difficulty. Learning often is not fun....

And finally there are for-profit ignorance, which is maintained by withholding knowledge, as in advertising, and for-power ignorance, which is maintained by government secrecy and public lies.

Kinds of ignorance....having sorted them out, one must scramble them back together again by acknowledging that all of them can be at work in the same mind at the same time, and in my opinion they frequently are.'

The complete The Way of Ignorance by Wendell Berry can be found in The World-Ending Fire, Published by Penguin.

FINISHED READING - The World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry

 

The World-Ending Fire, is a phrase Wendell Berry uses to characterise the dominant and all prevailing juggernaut of corporate industrialism. This book is a compilation of a lifetimes writing of articles, essays and talks about the many ways that the 'big is always better' economic philosophy behaves as an insensitive, fundamentally cruel and destructive force. Wiping lives, livelihoods and now threatening to remove life itself off the earth. 

His focus in terms of a solution always returns to agriculture. How we treat the land, the way we grow our food being the fundamental indicator for what is good or bad in our society. Wendell Berry constantly extols the role of maintaining a sense of belonging to a place and working the land in a more synchronous relationship with what nature provides. Under standing natures limits and not living beyond them. To cease using machine metaphors to describe yourself, your psychology and what it is you do. Its not helpful to conceive a living being or nature in this way, but it is indicative of how progressive industrialism conceptions have entered the lexicon of our language.

The problem for all of us is that we are deeply enmeshed and dependent upon the lifestyle that corporate industrialism provides. But we are cushioned and left unaware of the true cost of it. We have been brought up no longer knowing where the food on our plates comes from. What the damage to nature and to other peoples lives is. We are taught to actually not care, to become insensitive to the effect maintaining our western lifestyle has upon others and global ecology.

My interest whilst reading The World-Ending Fire wavered depending on the Chapter. I flipped from feeling engaged to boredom a lot. Berry is thorough, rarely succinct and to the point. In short he can go on and on at length. Its in the nature of compilations as opposed to the singlular vision of a composed treatise, there can be a degree of repetitious argument. Going over the same or similar ground. There are, however, some superbly argued essays here The Way of Ignorance, The Total Economy and In Distrust of Movements, are three personal  favourites.

Berry strongly states that there should be no big solutions to our current malaise. Its all down to us. There is the danger we don't as individuals realise quite how radical the change required of us is, and merely tinker with the existing economics of our lives and not think it through or carry it out thoroughly enough.

In the essay The Future of Agriculture he suggests seven things to do :-

1) Don't work or think on a heroic scale, but on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification, ever, for permanent ecological damage.

2) Abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialisation can be corrected by more industrialisation.

3) Quit solving our problems by 'moving on' Stay put, learn where we are geographically, historically and ecologically.

4) Learn the sources and costs of our own economic lives.

5) Give up the notion we are too good to do our own work and clean up our own messes. Work done for us by wage slavery or enslaving nature is unacceptable.

6) By way of correction, make local, locally adapted economies, based on local nature, local sunlight, local intelligence and local work

7) Understand that these measures are radical. They go to the root of our problem. They cannot be performed for us by any expert, political leader, or corporation.

CARROT REVIEW  5/8

EVERYDAY RITUALS - No 2 Cleaning

This second in a series of articles shines a light on one ritualised element in our lifestyle - cleaning. Discovering along the way how we could make more of it. To deepen and enrich our experience of our life as we already live it.

Patterns of Cleaning

My Mother inculcated in me 'the correct way' to wash up. First, the water must be hot, but not to the point of scalding. You  mm then wash up in a set sequence. Whilst the water is at its hottest, soapy and unsullied by anything else - wash the glassware. This is followed by the cutlery then plates before proceeding to the serving crockery and finally the pots and pans. Always the dirtiest items coming last.

Admittedly the cleaning logic of this begins to break down before you reach the end. If the washing up water becomes a soup, you could always start afresh. This routine was passed down to me from an era not at all concerned about chemical residues, nor rinsing in cold water or sterilising. You complete your cleaning cycle, by drying everything with a tea towel and putting the stuff away. Not leaving things on the drainer to air dry in an irregular stack like a jenga tower. 

I've tended to follow this pattern of washing up unquestioningly with an almost religious level of devotion. For good or ill, each of us brings to the task of washing up and cleaning in general our own particular set of associations, rationalisations and reactivities. Examine the way you wash up , where that comes from, how attached you are to it being done in a specific manner. Negative or positive, there you will find its level of meaning for you as a ritual.

Confusing Cleaning With Tidy
We talk about making spaces clean and tidy. Though we perhaps should treat them as if they're twins joined at the hip. Things can be tidy without being clean, and clean without being tidy. Which is not to say they can't very effectively collaborate with each other. Tidy is simply a way to order things in a room. It means different things to different people. I've lived with people who surround themselves with what look like extremely messy living conditions to me, who nonetheless know where to find things. Having a sense for order need not therefore be totally associated with being neat 'n' tidy. Order is when everything has a place where it can be found.

Cleaning As Drudgery
Undoubtedly cleaning, when obliged to do it, say because its your job, or done under pressure to conform to a standard of cleanliness not yours, can turn into a real bind. Its culturally low in status, so its no surprise cleaning can have a low priority. It can feel demeaning and it is time consuming, seemingly never ending.

Our modern lifestyles can become a series of actions done in order to save time. Rushing through or skipping cleaning to make space for ' the more important things'. We tend to hope we will encounter these through being more spontaneous, but end up only snacking on momentary whims. Leaving our desire to be nourished by 'the more important things' in life, frustrated. Will we ever find the time for what we believe we want from life? We need to stop, to reevaluate, to give our desires and perceptions a good spring clean. Recognising that what we want and what we need might not necessarily be singing fron the same songbook.

Repetition is an essential part of a ritual, whether its done everyday or not. We often refer to repetitive tasks as mindless. They aren't necessarily mindless, but they may become motivated by a willful, forcefulness off mind, that can be heartless. When our heart is not in it, that is when cleaning can turn into drudgery. Even tasks we love doing can be emotionally draining, if we are just not in the mood for them.

Cleaning As Purification and Renewal
Every morning I go to the bathroom still half bleary-eyed. Once there I take off my bed attire, cast it to the floor and step naked into the shower. I wait for the electric shower to warm up before I dowse my skin under it. As I clean my body of the lingering effects of stale sweat, farts and slumber I am performing a ritual of purification. Washing away remnants of the previous day and night, the joys, dreams and struggles. I'm waking up my body and mind under a stimulating cascade of falling water. A shower in the morning is a baptism, it matters not how long or short it is. I emerge from it purged of bodily sins, of the spirit. Briefly I am a purer person. I gently dry myself with a towel.  Everything else washed away and down the plug hole. Relaxed and renewed, I'm ready to begin my day. 

The role of soap in this cleansing ritual is central. It may come delivered as a shampoo in a bottle or a bar of soap. Something pored out into your hand, anoints your body with a libation, an offering to the deities of purification. A bar of natural handmade soap is gently rubbed and lathered over the body, caressed by your own hand. They can both feel medicinal, a soothing balm, massaged across and into the skin, perfuming our senses and well being. It restores our sense of youth.

My current soap infuses air and body with the smell of Cucumber and Mint. Its aroma alone exudes a pure unsullied cleanliness, as the associations with the exotic and pampering of the soul are enacted.  Purification rituals leave a tingling feeling upon the skin, a residual scent upon the psyche.  We start each day by removing the last vestiges of the previous one. Before putting on those purified fresh clothes, we can further perfume the body with oils and unguents, or colognes and antiperspirants.

The qualities inherent to this daily cleansing ritual asks us to give closer attention to their sensory qualities. The way, and the experience, of carrying them out. To ensure the actions, sounds, smells and feel of them can be heightened in some way for us.

Cleaning As Attention, Care and Love
Practical domestic tasks have a similar function to a morning shower, they purify and renew. Objects we use or wear require cleaning and refreshing fairly regularly, as they become dirty, smelly or covered in a layer of dirt. Cleaning the house, washing clothes or washing up are relentless if you make them masters. There are aspects of this as a ritual that is not about restorative cleaning, but concerned with the bringing and giving of attention. 

When washing or dusting you pick things up, examine them more closely than usual, you give them some care. This reconnects you with that teapot, shirt or mirror. Memories resurface of what it was that you loved about them when you bought them. Observing how they, like ourselves, are aging, are becoming worn, wrinkled or frayed around the edges. Empathy has a recognisable surface patina.

Until you polish a vase you don't realise how much the colours and lustre of its finish have become dimmed over time. Once cleaned it sparkle, its visibly brighter with renewed intensity. We tend to think we clean things only when they look visibly dirty. But we also clean them because they need our care and attention. We can become neglectful of our connection with the aesthetic aspects of ourselves and our home environment. Cleaning is an act of love, a ritual of remembering, connecting and rekindling. Other people notice sub consciously when a house and its objects are loved and cared for, as much as we do. 

A clean room feels different. As you feel different yourself when you are freshly washed. Likewise the way you relate to your home, clothes and objects once you've cleaned them is changed. Your interest in them is renewed. Also there is an ecology, a sustainable aspect to caring for ourselves and cleaning our possessions. A hoover that isn't regularly emptied, a oven that isn't cleaned or a kettle that's not descaled from time to time, eventually ceases to work efficiently. Without frequent love, care and attention, like any of us, they breakdown. 

Cleaning A Space In Your Mind
Its easy to neglect the effect our living spaces and environment are having upon us. I know that I can tolerate a degree of mess around me, if only for a short while. Then I reach a point where my mind becomes quite fuzzy headed and fatigued, because I'm negotiating my lifestyle around these disorganised circumstances. Once a floor has items randomly scattered across it like a scene from a robbery, then somethings just gotta give. A space can develop this sympathetic vibe, mirroring back to us our recent emotional or psychological state of mind or being, our way of inhabiting it.

Any minor change to our living space, can then have a major impact upon our sense of mental well being.  It could simply be by being a bit cleaner, slightly more orderly or adjusting the arrangement of furniture. Sometimes cleaning or clearing a room, my workshop in particular, is one way I prepare myself to start a new project or face a onerous task I've been putting off. You feel differently about any space once the nagging chatter of your residual old clutter is removed. A place that once felt dispiriting can suddenly feel considerably more spacious and energising. Cleaning becomes this ritual of preparation, making a space in your mind ready for a fresh activity.

It maybe a particular space regularly gets into a mess. Most homes have a room, cupboard or drawer that becomes the favourite one to quickly dump stuff in and close one's mind to. Sorting that out waiting until you're in the right mood for it. Sometimes its left up to your executors once you've died, to open up that ' drawer of unfinished business.' Even the tidiest, neatest person imaginable stuffs the messier bits of their psyche down the back of a sofa. Hides their underwear away from the light of day.

Too much chaos in a room, or an excessively neat and tidy room with not a fart of personality left in it, can be hard to be around. Whether too slovenly filthy or neurotically clean, both can freak you out because their inhumanity is a bit gross. Creating a civilised living space that allows a degree of human eccentricity, that has some soul left within its order, can be tricky balance to maintain. There are optimal amounts of space and cleanliness we all need for our minds and lives to operate freely.

The rituals of cleansing that we do for ourselves, we also do for its benefit to family, or friends. My home can get a little grubby. A busy work life makes its harder to keep on top of domestic chores. Too mentally or physically fatigued to face yet another task list when you get home. However, as soon as someone is about to come to visit or stay with us, then a manic amount of cleaning happens in a short space of time. Even if we mostly live in a subliminal mess, we don't want others to see that we do. But neither do we want them to stay in one. We create at least the misperception of a clean, well kept and purified space to welcome our family and friends into. Otherwise it might look like we don't care for them. 

Cleaning is a ritual of invitation. Like leaving out a welcome matt for new ideas, new beliefs, new feelings, new experiences, new people, for the new gods to arrive.

QUOTATION MARKS 52 - Wendell Berry

 

'We still (sometimes) remember that we can never be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.'

Wendell Berry
from his essay The Pleasures of Eating.

FEATURE - Little Simz ft. Obongjayar - Point & Kill

Everything this woman does has got class. Very stylish, yet authentic, whilst freely exploring her musical inspiration and ancestry. On this track from her new album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, its music from seventies West Africa. You can tell from the tongue in cheek visual references in the video, the Afro hair, the muscle men, she's had a lot of fun messing around with the period styles. 

The starker cool jazz inflections from her last LP Grey Area are replaced on Point & Kill by an equally minimal rumbling bass and stick driven rhythm, that gradually introduces a bursting brass section and finally electric keyboard and tumultuous drums. Over which Simz and Obongjayar rap about something or other. But who cares when it sounds this joyous.

FINISHED READING - The Midnight Library by Mat Haig

Its an odd sensation when reading the first chapter of a novel, that you feel you know where the plot is going to take you, before you've read any further.  Constant reflections of other books and films flashing through your mind and intruding. And it is true The Midnight Library's basic premise is a well worn narrative conceit. A central character reaches some sort of crisis and is shown the consequences for their lives should they take, or not take, a different path. I was reminded of Dicken's - A Christmas Carol, Powell & Pressburger's - A Matter of Life and Death and Frank Capra's -Its A Wonderful Life. All venerable and honourable parables of a similar spiritual journey. Let's not mention Paulo Coelho, just move on, quickly, move on.

This type of story line has an inherently moral purpose. Generally ending with the central protagonist realising their current life is good enough. That it can be approached differently and be more fulfilling. In The Midnight Library, Nora has given up on life, its all just a mess, and wants it to end. At this point of desperation she finds herself in the Midnight Library with Mrs Elms a much loved school teacher as her guide. On its shelves are her book of regrets and all the books containing the many possible lives she might live. Each book chosen takes her to that singular life until she realises this isn't what she wants, which then returns her to the library, ever so slightly wiser. Thus learning about the half baked nature of her regret. How lives go awry in many ways all the time, and that that is OK.

This type of book could be too earnest, easily descending into cliché, being patronising or cloyingly sentimental. It is a testament to Haig's deceptively simple, yet nifty intelligent writing, that he mostly dodges these pitfalls. Though it can't completely avoid the all pervading vibe of predictability. Writing a positive uplifting novel takes courage these days when nihilistic cynicism is the favoured currency. Not to mention a certain degree of inventiveness to get around the more obvious plot holes. When Nora is thrust into yet another life scenario, you still question whether she'd bluff and negotiate her way through the unfamiliar circumstances of it, quite so easily.

Haig writes in brief chapters of a few pages. All easily digested before bed time, over a sandwich lunch in a park or on a crowded tube train. The deja vu familiarity of it means you can pick it up and put it down without fear of losing track, should you not touch it for a week or two. It is philosophically and psychologically lite, so it won't weigh heavily on your sleep or sense of equalibrium. Nor challenge you to go out and live a completely different life. It feels as though it ought to be more instructive or inspiring than it is. Nora never really existed for me as a person I could resonate with. Even though the life dilemmas she deals with are certainly universal. Without personal identification it didn't carry me emotionally along with it.

Though it undoubtedly touches and salves the spirit. Its mostly like a very bland Italian meal, that goes down easily without seemingly providing nutrition or feeding your hunger. No wonder its sold so well.

CARROT REVIEW 3/8

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 53 - Notes On Staycation World

Most encounters with our customers are fleeting, pleasant and don't leave much by way of an identifiable or indelible mark upon either of our psyches. And in a way why should it?  We are simply pleasantly agreeing upon and partaking in a transaction. However.......

Our neighbours in the courtyard in the cafe and craft beer shop have  encountered since the pandemic an increasing amount of verbal abuse and uncalled for stroppy customer behaviour. Probably an indication of the countries collective state of mental health after restrictions and several lock downs. Tense, bad tempered, resentful, on edge, wanting to hit out, to find a focus for unprocessed frustrations. Shopkeepers have always been sitting ducks for this type of behaviour.

The worst it gets for us in Cottonwood Home is a certain derision in the eyes, a snottiness, or hostile glare from beyond our shop window. People know when we are not their sort of shop, so they generally don't come in. Though we do hear the wives who ask ' shall we go in here' to her husband, and gets an abrupt 'Nope' in reply.  We see the men walking off, after having got their beer. Walking off when you are the one holding the purse strings, means they can either deny or grant their little woman's pleasure. Along the lines of ' I'm not paying that for a bar of soap' ditto candle, mug, sex etc - to the slightly creepier 'you let me know whatever you want babes' Oh the pastronising largesse of the traditional male role.

The other day two wyrd aged sisters, both dressed in a floaty melange of greeny blue hand dyed dresses, wafted in. Looking for all the world like a Monet painting of a lily pond, but with legs. They stopped to gaze at our wall of lampshades. One turned to me with a wary hostile look in her eye, as she delved into her bag. Eventually producing a pack of sanitising hand wipes. Which she very pointedly and thoroughly used in front of me as if the whole shop, including me, struck her as inherently grubby and a bio hazard. She then said 'Do you ever reduce all your prices' After my reply of 'Only in our Spring Sale' in the same way they arrived they floated out on their gossamer wings.

A lot of things change quite dramatically in high tourist season. Yes, the town is frequently heaving. But this summer many things have been more notable. The average obesity level of people in the town rises quite dramatically. Whole generations of a family - four, five, six. adults and children descending in height like plump inflatable Russian dolls. 

The old lady 'day of the soap sniffers' has returned. Addicted to the mask penetrating pong, they fail to slacken their purse strings, even though they did inhale. We also hear, once again, the filthy cackle of women who lose all self control laughing uproariously at the rude cards outside the off licence next door.

 

There are days when it seems every other person appears to be hobbling around on crutches, a zimmer frame - with or without a shopping trolley attached, riding along on a mobility scooter, or someone whose mental and physical faculties are so worse for wear they require a carer to accompany them everywhere they go. All of these, boldly signify that today's or this weeks visitors are a bit 'off brand' for us, to borrow an apt phrase from Schitt's Creek. We then know that the off licence or hippy shop will be positively heaving, whilst we remain quiet. Left gazing out upon other people's customers. Trying to deny the degree of envy. But, fear not, our moment does come, when the tables are reversed.

One day in the cafe there was an working class couple from Essex sat at a table in the courtyard cafe. Talking across to another couple saying ' We love coming to Sheringham its so relaxing, it like entering another slower pace of life. We come here regular, don't we love? Its just so loverly and quiet' all delivered in the loudest most earsplitting bellowing voice you can imagine. As if they spend most of their life talking over the noise of a road drill.

There's been more badly controlled yappy dogs and badly controlled car driving. A lot of careless absent mindedness and to hell with it risk taking going on. Loads of low slung sports cars with the baffles taken off, where the ground vibrates as they sweep past. Huge four wheeled ranger trucks, so clean that they wouldn't know a country road even if it hit them with mud splatter. Towering over people and the road might bring a feeling of power and domination in an urban environment. Broad enough to fill the entire width of the North Norfolk coast road, they are just a bit of an anachronistic sore thumb here. But I guess you do need obese cars to carry the obese family in.

Driving to Holt we passed a man wobbling precariously whilst riding on his bicycle. Was he drunk? Or had he not ridden a bike before? No, he teetered because his dog was on a long lead and it was pulling him all over the road. On another day a cyclist deliberately rode in the middle of the lane so no one could get passed him. After crossing a narrow bridge the road straightened and broadened out so we overtook him. But as we completed our manoeuvre he reasserted his position back in the middle of the lane. Causing the cars behind us to break and honk their horns. Egregious power mode on the road.

On a lighter note. It is the season for Summer Fetes what a relief it must be to be outside buying your poorly made tat, in the wind, and the rain too. I guess that would be very special. Then there are the classical cello concert events held in semi-redundant parish churches in places like Trunch or The Relief of Mafeking Commemoration Village Hall in Little Moving. With wonderfully named performers like Orlando Jopping, ( look them up, I haven't invented them ) My Hubby put it memorably 'It's so good they are providing ordinary working class musicians with opportunities to perform,'

The daily and weekly pattern of trade in the shop, is absolutely all over the show, you'd have thought someone up there was being a bit of a tease.  Though it has been very good. August was by a long way our best months takings ever. Our better days tend to happen mid-week, the traditional busy summer Saturday is now quite a rare occurrence. The mornings generally very very quiet, we may not take a shekel until 1pm or even later some  days. An entire days substantial takings happening often within the space of one hour. This is not the same buying pattern as last year, which was different to the year previous. Its all utterly baffling. We are forced to just throw up our hands and declare we just don't know what to expect. So we expect nothing, constantly having to learn how to trust, to have a little faith in the gods of the subliminal.