Ladydale Diary
Saints Cornelius and Cyprian 2021
As I write, I’m supping a blonde ale, which is made by the Benedictine monks of Norcia, or Nursia, in Italy. For those who don’t know, Norcia is the town in Umbria in which Saint Benedict and his sister Saint Scholastica were born. The monks of Norcia, most of whom I believe are American and one of whom is a graduate from Saint Joseph’s Catholic School here in Greenville, renovated the ruins of the old abbey and have formed a revitalized Benedictine community on the site of the birthplace of the founder of their order. This is a quintessential case of tradition making all things new, like Christ Himself, and a manifestation of its ability to rise from the dead. Let all enemies of tradition take note!
In any event, the monks of Norcia brew two really excellent ales. Their “abbey-style” ale is inspired by the celebrated Trappist ales from Belgium. Here we see true ecumenism: the Benedictines basking in the Cistercian tradition! This abbey ale is my favourite, which is why I have none left and why I’m drinking their other offering, the blonde ale. No complaints, however. It has much more character, especially in terms of fruit, than most lighter ales.
Moving on from the glories of the good life “wherever the Catholic sun doth shine”, as Belloc would say, let’s look back on the week that was.
On Saturday morning, having only managed one visit to the gym during the previous week, I headed to the local sports club for an overdue and much-needed workout. These days, for the past year or so, I don’t powerlift, pushing my body to its limit, but do more reps with lighter weights. This has proved necessary due to wear and tear on my aging body. I could feel that doing bench press with heavy weight was causing issues with my rotator cuff. I could either be prudent and temperate and desist, or I could face surgery within a year or two. I chose the former option. Now I do dumbbell press, using lighter weight. The big difference is that lighter weights and more reps, with less time between sets, is much better as a cardio workout, as well as being gentler on my aging body. It also enables me to work out all the muscle groups in every workout, rather than doing specific muscle groups each time. As I’m getting to the gym less often these days, this is important.
After the gym, I headed straight to a local bar to meet friends and watch Chelsea play Aston Villa. Another victory for the boys in blue!
On Sunday, after we returned from Mass, and after lunch and my customary sabbath siesta, I collected firewood from the woods surrounding our home and built a fire. There’s something primal about building a fire and sitting by it. One attains silence and communion with reality, and with the God of reality. On Sunday evening, we had a film night watching the earliest film adaptation of Chesterton’s Father Brown, which dated from 1934 when GKC was still alive. I wonder if he ever watched it. Were he to have done so, I doubt that he would have been any more impressed than were we. It was bland and shallow.
Monday was mainly devoted to the multifarious e-mails that arrived over the weekend, though I did do a radio interview in the midst of the fray.
On Tuesday morning, I managed to write two essays in the morning: one for the Imaginative Conservative on “Great British Novels” and the other for Crisis Magazine on “Hamlet in a Nutshell”. At noon I departed for Georgia to give a talk at St. Peter Chanel parish in Roswell, just north of Atlanta. It was a highly enjoyable evening. I spoke on “Catholic Responsibility in Today’s World” and enjoyed convivial conversation with many of those who gravitated to my book table after the talk. I also sold many books which is always a good empirical measurement of the quality of the audience!
Having had a nightcap with friends, I enjoyed a restful night in a hotel, rising at 6am to beat the morning rush hour and to be back home in good time to prepare for the class I was teaching on Wednesday afternoon and the recording of the FORMED Book Club which followed it. The class was the second in a six-week course on Belloc’s masterpiece, The Path to Rome, and the Book Club discussion with Father Fessio continued to focus on Chesterton’s essays. Yesterday evening, we had another family film night, watching To Be or Not to Be, a wartime comedy starring Jack Benny, which was much better, and funnier, than I’d expected. In a nutshell, Hitler meets Shakespeare, specifically Shylock and Hamlet. Great fun!
That was yesterday. Today I had hoped to make some progress on the book I’m currently writing but this was not to be. I did much else instead. The time was not wasted, therefore, but merely diverted to other good things. Prior to writing this week’s Diary, bringing us to the present moment, I’d recorded the three podcasts for the Inner Sanctum, one of which takes us to the Yorkshire Moors and the ghosts of Roman legions, another to a celebration of silence with the Romantic poets, and the third to a continuation of our discussion of Tolkien’s philosophy of myth.
Tomorrow, God willing, I will have time to make progress on the book. Prayers please!
