On the hoof
WE’VE just married a daughter. Never famed for the strength of my tear ducts, I was, none the less, caught unawares by the emotional rollercoaster beforehand. We love our new son-in-law, and could not be happier that they have found each other. She moved to Scotland 20 months ago to be with him; so it didn’t feel as if the fact of their getting married should have made all that much difference. But it did — and of course, if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be much point in doing it at all.
Once term ended, she came home for a week before the wedding. We had had happy visions of walking in the countryside, and the glorious weather held. But the dog injured his leg (a minuscule wound, which nevertheless bled copiously and required suturing under sedation — the eye-watering cost in inverse proportion to the size of the injury), and so he was confined to barracks; the daughter had chosen to ice her own wedding-cake, and so the kitchen disappeared beneath a blizzard of icing sugar; and the days slid by in a flurry of spreadsheets and last-minute arrangements.
Surveying the trail of shoes (and sometimes socks) which invariably announces her presence, I realised that what we’d actually had was something far more typical — and, therefore, infinitely precious.
Feet on the ground
THE dog’s injury was to the carpal pad on one of his front legs. Despite having spent much of my life around dogs, I had no idea of the function of the pad, which is an ingenious combination of shock absorber and emergency brake. It also contributes to a dog’s balance — which has set me thinking about human balance and mobility.
I see with one of our elderly neighbours (and I remember, from my mother’s later years) what a difference healthy feet make. A podiatrist recently told me that she was inspired to do her job because it was the only one that she could think of where everyone who comes to see her leaves feeling better than when they arrived. Simply treating a corn or an ingrown toenail (evidently they often go together: a corn is the body’s protective response to pressure, and so a corn beneath an ingrown toenail is an excruciating but not uncommon combination) sends the patient out with a smile on their face, ready to audition for Strictly.
If your feet are comfortable, you’re more mobile, and so likely to be fitter both physically and mentally. But the NHS no longer seems to do feet — or teeth, for that matter. Where “medically necessary”, podiatry is still available on the health service, but at the discretion of the local PCT; so it’s too often a casualty of pressure on budgets, leaving many elderly people, in particular, metaphorically cut off at the ankles — unless you’re lucky enough to live in an area where AgeUK offers footcare services.
Surely any lasting reform of the health service should try to turn it from reactive to proactive: pre-emptive investment in foot care would be a drop in the financial ocean compared with the costs of enforced (but preventable) immobility.
Mixed messaging
ONE moment in the wedding service had an unexpected resonance. The priest leading the prayers inadvertently petitioned that any children of the marriage should be “Christianly and virtually brought up”, which seemed only too horribly appropriate at a time when all the evidence suggests that we now over-protect our children offline (in anxiety about letting them out alone, for example) while under-protecting them online.
As has been often observed, there is an extraordinary irony in the fact that something originally designed to facilitate communication should now have the effect of isolating each of us in our own virtual world, with devastating consequences for everything from attention spans to human relationships and communal life.
And yet . . . mobile phones have opened up life-changing possibilities, not least in microfinance, and above all in initiatives for mHealth (using mobile devices such as phones, smartwatches, and tablets to support health care), notably in relation to HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. Many people use their phones for regular prayer apps and online worship.
I love the immediacy of WhatsApp; the capacity to share photos; the possibilities of YouTube. I have a daily online ritual of what I fondly persuade myself is brain-training — and, indeed, my knowledge of word structures and geography (of the United States in particular) has improved immeasurably. But it has done nothing for my attention span (my brain is now like a laptop with too many tabs open, and I keep hopping between them); and I am constantly torn between my desire to be (selectively) available and my exasperation at being interrupted.
Left standing
OUR daughter and her husband met online — although, if he had remembered to change his location settings after moving north, they would never have made contact. When they eventually decided to meet, their first date had to be at York railway station. (This was at least a better outcome than for the unfortunate school contemporary who asked her on a date, and — in the early days of predictive text — received the response that she was busy “until the end of time”.)
Even a decade ago, the most common way to meet your partner was through human networks: family, friends, school; now, 60 per cent of couples meet online. A startling animated graph (online, of course) shows the change since 1930, when family and school were almost equally responsible for introducing couples (22 per cent each), followed by friends (just over 18 per cent); church was the matchmaker for ten per cent.
By 1980, friends were responsible for almost 27 per cent of introductions, followed by family at 15 per cent — and then the internet arrives. From about five per cent (the same as church) at the turn of the millennium, online dating races away to its unassailable lead today, with the next highest category — friends — barely 14 per cent. (Interestingly, despite Covid, co-workers is one of the few categories that has increased, from less than three per cent in 1930 to 8.5 per cent today.)
Clearly, the internet has the capacity to bring together people who would never otherwise meet — but, as usual, the problem stems from how we use the gifts at our disposal. We are so used to shopping online that we instinctively use dating apps in the same way: as consumers rather than as humans in relation to one another.
If it’s about anything, Christianity is surely about persons in communion; and about the power of giving thanks to transform the humblest items into something life-changing. Today, we’re forgetting how to relate to one another — not understanding that that is an instinct that needs practice — and fashionable mindfulness practitioners preach the wisdom of being thankful to a population that seems largely to perceive the Church as a bigoted bureaucracy. Jesus wept.
Age shall not weary them
I AM obviously becoming a Grumpy Old Woman — but here the internet offers some reassurance. It has apparently been “proved” that people in their fifties are happier than those in their twenties (not necessarily a very encouraging marker), and levels of enjoyment and positive mental health increase as we age — possibly because we have a greater sense of happiness as a by-product rather than an entitlement.
I have not yet looked for the point at which this cheering curve starts to reverse, but I am sure that uncomfortable feet must have a part to play.
Caroline Chartres is a contributing editor to the Church Times.
