Love to All, Temple

‘It’s all right; I’ve got used to Temple saying, “I love you,” to random people.’

At the point where PDB11 said that, we were round at Doom Metal Singer’s caravan, and she had been telling us about the troubles she had been facing recently.  I was worried by the facts that she hadn’t told us before, and that she had a cracked rib which had been healing more slowly than necessary because she couldn’t avoid bending and lifting in gathering firewood, fetching shopping, and so on, when we would have been happy to help if she had only asked us.  I just wanted her to know that she had friends who cared about her.

I hadn’t realised how freely I use the words, ‘I love you,’ and even hug people if they give me permission, as it's not fair to inflict hugs on people when they're not in the mood.

Doom Metal Singer had given me permission, so I gave her a sort of shoulder-hug, trying to avoid her ribs (and with heads facing over each other’s shoulders to avoid Covid transmission – we’re all vaccinated, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful).  The week before, a friend at Dungeons and Dragons had been talking about their problems, but explained that they didn’t like being touched.  They allowed me to give them a ‘virtual hug’, standing a safe distance away but with arms outspread in an ‘I love you’ gesture.

I protested that I didn’t say ‘I love you,’ to random strangers, only to good friends like Doom Metal Singer.  PDB11 pointed out that he had heard me say it to a dog not long ago.

This morning, the vicar described how, when she had spent time in America, she had discovered that Americans celebrate St Valentine’s day very differently from British people.  Whereas, in Britain, it is almost exclusively a festival of romantic love, in America it can be a time for expressing all kinds of love: for example, a time to take a good friend out to lunch, or a time for schoolchildren to give out cards to all the children in their class.

It struck me that, in the modern world and particularly modern Britain, we have a very compartmentalised view of who is allowed to enjoy which festivals.  A friend of mine, an Englishman who spends much of his time travelling across Europe, once mentioned that when he was spending winter in Poland, his Polish friends had invited him to join them for Christmas dinner, but he had refused because he felt that Christmas should be a time for families, and that, as he didn’t have a family, he was supposed to spend Christmas feeling lonely and left-out.

Today, many people narrow Christmas celebrations down even further to being just a time for the nuclear family (parents with children still living at home), or just a time for couples.  A few years ago, my father dismissed out of hand the idea of inviting my brother and his girlfriend to Christmas dinner, on the grounds that they were expecting a baby, this would be the last opportunity they had to spend Christmas with just the two of them, and so they would obviously want to spend Christmas alone.  He might have been right – but he could have asked them.

Perhaps this is why so many Christmas pop songs are about being lonely at Christmas after having split up with your lover.  My favourite Christmas film, Bernard and the Genie, opens with the hero being sacked from his job and coming home to find that his fiancée has left him for his best friend.  The implication is that he has no other options than to spend Christmas alone – at least until he accidentally summons a genie, and they become friends after a rather rocky start, and have fun spending Christmas together.

Bernard’s mother is apparently still alive (though, as we only see her when she magically appears in his flat when he carelessly exclaims, ‘I wish my mum could see me now!’ she could be a ghostly apparition summoned from the afterlife).  But the idea of spending Christmas with family never seems to occur to him.  And, even though he is a Christian, neither does the idea of going to church.

If we regarded Christmas as a solely religious festival, non-Christians probably wouldn’t feel disappointed at missing out on it, any more than I feel sad at not having anything to celebrate at Diwali because I’m not a Hindu.  But when Christmas is promoted as a general festival of jollity that should be the highlight of everyone’s year – unless, of course, you don’t have a partner or family to celebrate it with – it seems calculated to make a lot of people miserable.

Similarly, the British tradition of celebrating the fourth Sunday of Lent as Mothering Sunday originally simply meant a day to visit your ‘mother church’, the church in which you were baptised - which, in the days when most British people were Christians except for a minority of Jews, would have applied to nearly everyone.  Of course, in practice, a day off to go back to your home village would also be a time to see your parents, but this was part of the greater celebration which was being part of God’s family.

But in the twentieth century, Mothering Sunday became the British/Irish/Channel Islands (and Nigerian) version of Mother’s Day – a time to give cards and presents to your mother, if she’s still alive, or to be given cards and presents by your children, if you are a mother.  So the unintended message is that, if you don’t have children and your own parents are dead, this is a day to feel left out.

If you wish, of course, you are welcome to dismiss all these festivals as meaningless, over-commercialised occasions for a lot of synthetic, transient sentimentality, and ignore them.  But perhaps it is better to find ways to extend them beyond the obvious. 

Whether or not you are religious, and whether or not you are a member of a specific category of the human race such as mothers or lovers, you are human (or if there are any non-humans reading this blog, I’d be delighted to hear from you).  Most humans feel the need to connect with other humans, but in practice, we aren’t all that good at staying in touch.

So, any day that reminds us to call, write to or visit people we haven’t spoken to for a while, or show love to the people we see frequently and might take for granted, is an opportunity worth taking – especially if we can find a less commercialised way of way of celebrating, like giving home-made cards.  But it’s worth going beyond the obvious. 

Instead of thinking, ‘It’s Valentine’s Day, and everyone else is out on a date and I’m alone because I’m too much of a loser to find a partner,’ you could ask yourself, ‘Are any of my friends also alone today, and might they want to come round?  Not for a date, but just to chill out, play some board games and eat takeaway in front of the telly?’ (or whatever you and your friends are likely to enjoy doing, as appropriate).

Okay, it’s easy for me to say that when, after being single for most of my life, I am now lucky enough to have a wonderful husband.  But that isn’t going to make me forget that he isn’t the only human being in the world.