It's another brilliantly sunny, mild morning: above freezing already, with a projected high of 50F. Today I need to return some emails and a phone call, continue my rounds of preparatory housework, make a dish to take to our friends' annual Gaudete Sunday party, and continue reading P.D. James's Death in Holy Orders. This was ostensibly the storyline of the first two episodes of the new season of Dalgleish, which we watched last night --- key word: ostensibly. P.D. James, a sensible and intelligent and observant believer of her era (she died in 2014, so "her era" is basically our era), knew the culture of the Church of England with its tensions, which already seem quaint, between evangelical and Anglo-Catholic wings of the church. She would have written a silent rave scene in a cathedral as part of a futuristic dystopia --- she did in fact write our current fertility predicament in The Children of Men. But at the time of her death, just ten years ago, the C of E --- though hard at work on its own implosion --- had not achieved it quite as stunningly as it seems to have done in this Year of Our Lord 2024.
I'm not even talking about the just-resigned Archbishop of Canterbury and the current round of Anglican sex-abuse scandals. Who am I, a Roman Catholic, to talk about anybody else's sex-abuse scandals, as though we were not all part of the same sad fallen world? I really am talking about amusement parks and raves in the naves of great cathedrals, and nobody's seeming to think that there's anything at all incongruent about those phenomena --- which, I guess, once you stop believing as a matter of universal dogma that there's anybody at home in the tabernacle, is just an instance of things taking their natural course.
Anyway, nobody expects television producers to get anything right about religion, as indeed, in this storyline of Dalgleish, they do not. Here is this arcane Victorian pile, housing a seminary; here are all these vaguely maladjusted men swanning around in cassocks; here are statues and images with candles in front of them. Does anyone in this setting so much as cross himself, at any point? Reader, he does not. There is extemporaneous prayer. There is a seminarian getting up in church to say a few words off the top of his head in memory of a murdered person. The only difference between the seminary personnel and the Archdeacon who is their enemy is that the Archdeacon wants to sell off an altarpiece and they do not.
There's some murky personal bad blood between the Archdeacon and the seminary rector --- some veiled allusion to a woman's having chosen the handsome rector and not the less-handsome Archdeacon --- which you think is maybe going to come to fruition in some way, but does not. It's simply that there has to be some reason for the Archdeacon and the rector to dislike each other, and apparently the idea that religious differences (and the power play arising from those religious differences) might account for this dislike did not occur to anyone involved in the production of these episodes.
This is not to say that we didn't find these episodes entertaining, because we did --- BUT with the caveat that we do not expect religious literacy (at least when it comes to Christianity) from the people charged with creating our entertainment culture. Anyway, it had been so long since I'd read Death in Holy Orders that as soon as we came back from our walk, I hunted it down on the shelf and started rereading it, just to see. And indeed. As I had suspected, Baroness James is far savvier about the things she's writing about than are the people whose job it is to interpret her writing into television drama.
Anyway. So now, in addition to the other things I had already planned to do today, it's my job --- I owe it to humanity --- to reread this book.
Wearing today:
*Wool& Brooklyn dress (S/Long) in Pacific, bought May 2023, last worn November 16. It has been a minute. Total wears this year to date: 19 or 20 --- I have taken this dress with me on many travels and might have missed a day here or there.
*Thrifted Banana Republic lavender merino sweater, bought November 2024, last worn yesterday
*Secondhand Allbirds tencel-merino leggings, bought January 2024
*Xero Oswego shoes, bought late fall 2021, last worn yesterday
I took a lot of photos of this outfit, hoping that I'd like it better than I do. It feels a little strange, and I might change clothes later. It's been a while since I last worn this dress, which is why I wanted to wear it, but I'm not sure that layering a tee or sweater under it really works. I had seen someone else styling a Brooklyn this way for winter and thought I'd give it a try, but I don't think this combination is ideal. It is warm, though, and will certainly do for dog-walking.
I think that boots would add more polish than these leggings/shoes do, and I could change to my Birkenstock Melrose boots --- but I want to get more wear out of these Oswegos, which I like but wish (most of the time) were not this color. Outside Advent and Lent, this shade of purple feels a little awkward, but maybe that's just a hangup I need to get over. They are very comfortable to walk and hike in, and I actually like them quite a lot in that respect. I'd ordered them on clearance when Xero stopped making them, and this purple was the color available in my size: I would otherwise have chosen green or the charcoal-gray I eventually did buy secondhand.
OK, yeah, even before I get out of the house, the layering was bugging me too much.
This is okay. Still not my fave, but all right for a Saturday morning. I do like getting all the wear I can out of this thrifted sweater, already in the negative numbers in cost-per-wear.
I really need to drag myself out now to walk the dog.
POST-WALK:
A scarf does improve so many situations.
AFTER-DINNER UPDATE:
We had chili for dinner, with Clausthaler non-alcoholic beer and then some non-alcoholic wine, which was a bit less like the real thing than the Clausthaler, but I didn't mind it.
After dinner, made tahini (a simple puree of toasted sesame seeds and olive oil), preparatory to making hummus to take to the Gaudete Sunday party we're going to tomorrow. Chickpeas are still cooking, so I'll put everything together when we get home from morning Mass.
Temperatures are dropping again, so I did change into boots, for a more polished look (for no reason, as what I'm doing for the remainder of the evening is read by the fire):
