2017 was a melancholy time, but this has been normal, and 2018 can only be the same, if not worse.
In 2017 I had a disagreement with a minister over another minister visiting with his co-authored book. I was apparently unkind about the book online, although I now think I was too kind. The upshot was my decision to walk away and now I have no dealings with Unitarianism, other than a distant watch over what happens online. Instead of attending a worship service weekly, as I had done, and a social gathering weekly, as I continued to do (and I was the most frequent attender at both), I now only refugee myself to the Quakers once a fortnight, having in any case spent time 'looking around' before my final act of self-removal. Previous to my walk away, I'd already reduced my worship attendance and was tentatively returning - only then by surprise event to call it a day.
The Unitarian regular attendance was about three or five or at most eight persons anyway, and many had effectively gone before me. I discover that my refugee place is a little better in numbers, and indeed my visits around (Anglican, URC, Methodist) showed that they were all down on what they once were.
By any measure, Christianity is dying, dying as an expression of faith in the ordinary course of things, and as evidenced by attendance. Unitarianism isn't obviously Christian in any effective sense, but this has not caused any improvement in its fortunes. Far from it. There is no future either in 'spiritual but not religious' strategies, which are meaningless anyway within structures that are religious and with an institutional memory. The long time played-out transition in religion is now starting to bite, as structures can no longer be supported on such low numbers, and as people no longer commonly think and express themselves in relation to these structures and their beliefs.
The Quakers, I notice, have quite a self-understood identity. The Friends get this through the 'meetings' that they attend at different levels and purposes: indeed I discovered that the worship hour (plus ten minute after-thoughts) is itself a meeting. The meeting is guided, and referred to often, by their Advices and Queries. To be a Quaker is to be something. Whilst I have participated and spoken, I don't think I want to attach myself to that memory. I did with the Unitarians and I am known for that connection, and I have over thirty plus years (gosh) attached myself to that institutional memory. In 2018 I doubt that I will begin to attach myself in any formal manner to the Quaker memory. I do wonder how many people will do up and down the land, because if people don't come anew and don't start to sign up, there won't be any soon. Same with the Unitarians of course, who have lower national numbers than the Friends, but the Friends are harder to join, and more is expected on a personal ethical basis (I think). The Quaker club is a stronger club, perhaps: the Unitarian inculturation takes a long time and creeps up gradually and it remains incredibly loose.
Even in my own mind there is the death of religion. I write about it a lot, but in a novel that has been building up for maybe four years. The religion there is informed and even intellectual, but in the novel it is cynical: used in a kind of Twin Peaks weird seaside town world. I'm not doing a Barchester Towers but investigating secrecy, truth (qualitative and quantitative) and untruth. The central first person narrating character is an intersex female deacon and then priest who ends up going independent, in fact becomes a bishop of (in the end) her own outfit that takes on the weird characteristics that she and her friends were once exposing and destroying. Some lyrics from The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again apply. Think of 'Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss' and also 'We were liberated from the fold, that's all, And the world looks just the same' singing in the background.
The novel is complete but I keep editing it (necessary) and keep adding bits in, so this will go on next year. Indceed, I have just written about a Conference on the Seaside Communities far off in Margate that happens early on, and has allowed some essential happenings - and these events have only just been thought up. How did this happen? Because recently in our shared world there has been research on the economy of the seaside town, and my mind looking at this made connections in my novel and realised something like this could set the scene not just for the location of "Serpensea" but also lay the ground for the narrative. It's about an extra 10,000 words. I like it. The narrative has echoes, with no spies being present, of Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People. In 2017 I bought the DVDs of these, having earlier acquired the literature, and I have watched them with the intensity of a student. In my novel people keep their weird ways secret by method, and yet everyone knows something funny is going on somewhere.
No doubt I will keep painting too. In 2016 I hardly painted a thing. Much had happened on the computer. And then in 2017 I suddenly started knocking them out on four quid for three canvases. I went to an art group for a very short time, and stopped because I calculated it was for the better-off retired. I cannot commit to any large-scale spending. I know that there are expenses down the line that have to be afforded first. So instead of doing a limited number of artists' models, I've been painting barmaids. One pub even asked me to do a couple of paintings of barmaids and barmen. The barmaids (but one as yet unvisited) have all received paintings. Funnily enough, as the driver of friends who enjoy pubs, I don't drink, and more than this I have a lower opinion about alcohol now. I've seen in a number of places it start to take casualties of people's lifestyles, and there is a fine line between good boozing and it taking over and loss of control.
The website went paid during the year. There was no option - once Dropbox stopped displaying the results of HTML, and showing only HTML code - but to find a host and one cheap enough. My website will be twenty years old in November 2018. It started with a page, and reached 1800 PDF and HTML pages. Then the galleries were sent to Facebook. From time to time I update the under-construction novel on the website, as I indeed record my other activities.
I use Facebook and have a blog; I don't use Twitter. I go into 2018 still without an active mobile phone. There are more than hints that my old and so-far reliable car could cost a lot at MOT time. Perhaps I need a mobile phone, should it become unreliable. But I much on the computer, still using Windows 7 and still thinking I want a better Operating System.
I was labelled 'disabled' in 2017, and it has good and bad effects. One good one has been the ability to park just about anywhere and at no cost. However, I can't walk a great distance and so I need this. I suddenly started to attend more interviews, but nothing has happened yet. I have one in the first week of the New Year. I manage in all the essential ways, but it's the shocks that will cause the boat to leak.
My friends are in transition too, it seems. The outlook is not good. One folded a long-term business and now sleeps better at night having got a just-above minimum wage job that requires much concentration and is physical. The other is uncertain for the future: transition and potential loss beckons. Nothing is certain.
The sources of romance websites have all shown themselves to be rubbish in my case: a few early responses years ago dried up years ago. Anything on this front would be a real surprise.
Yet you never know what is around the corner. Death comes at the end of it all, or course, but between now and then there might be a few pleasant as well as unpleasant unexpected happenings. I think, where the hell did the last twenty years go? Weeks pass in a flash, and indeed 2017 did not hang about.
Politics is, for me, a worry about the other, and it is why I am so adamant about the error of leaving the Europan Union. It makes not a scrap of difference to me, but I see it as a self-inflicted disaster that will harm generations. I believe in sharing economically and politically, in reducing tribalism, in being liberal and social, and seeing the potential best. For me, the European Union was never the given caricature of a bureaucracy, but a confederacy of similar political cultures tying themselves together for peace and prosperity and a wider vision. I have no influence on anyone, but just hope that words of argument to stay in seep out and that this body politic starts to see sense and stop the retreat. The European Union is a fact on the ground and we should be in there, currency and all. If the silly sods succeed in reducing our outlook, then I will still be here but it will be in a diminished political environment; and as one of the poor, I'll be hit by the consequences, as will many many more currently better off than me. This is the tragedy of what is coming, led by political donkeys.
Melancholy is my ordinary condition, and it is justified.
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