3 minute read
GILDED GHETTO
By Eric Page
TANTALISING HOMO HERMITS
So now we’re all anchorites, secluded in our naughty nunneries, monasteries of masc, or manly marabouts, cenobiarch gender nonspecific folk, trans stylites, dyke eremites, non-binary recluses or bog standard solitudinarians. I know! Go look them up, learn some new vocab today. We’re all in this together!
I’m choosing a different type of seclusion every day, keeping it real, serving up ascetic precision, category is: Homo Hermitage. I am withdrawn from the world, retired from society and imagine the world to be no bigger than a hazelnut, but filled with wonders none the less, much like I imagine Julian of Norwich did; who was a woman. Mother Julian, a serious anchorite in her day, walled herself up in her church and took to dolling out advice from a small hatch. People walked across England to implore her wisdom, although I’d be far more interested in where she had learned her bricking up skills and what kind of mortar is best for permanently enclosing oneself in a cell.
My dear grandmother Ivy used to sing a song about her, and strapped into the sidecar of her motorbike, my sisters and I would harmonise, in that sweet tight way that only family voices can achieve. The bungee cords, twisted and stretched around us, keeping us from being thrown out on the bramble strewn verges of the Welsh country lanes chaffed like hell as Ivy took another corner at 50 miles an hour, the wheel under us lifting, but she interpreted our screams as excitement and it drove her onwards, faster. ‘All shall be well again’ went the chorus of the song, ‘Let the winter come and go, all shall be well again, I know’. It’s a song that reminds me of Ivy every time I hear and sing it. Simple, profound and delicately subversive. Dame Julian also happened to have written the first book in the English language known to be by a woman. Revelations of Divine Love, written around 1395, which Ivy would quote huge chunks of. Filled with her visions, mystical prose, medieval medicine and serious advanced ideas about gender and sexuality and Julian’s own take on love; which is unconditional. It was Ivy’s bible.
The last time I rode in Ivy’s sidecar I was 16, we screamed across England on the old A4 heading to Norwich – she’d added a seatbelt by that time – to pick lavender from outside Julian’s Church, reconstructed after being flattened by a wartime Nazi bomb. Ivy said the words and plants were the only authentic part of Julian’s life to be left to us, from an unbroken link of spring and regrowth. She passed me a spliff, one of those tiny carrot shaped ones she used to keep in her bra, (the first time I’d been given one) and as she cussed out Hitler and waxed lyrically about Mable Carter’s pizzicato and living in Maces Spring, Virginia where she said she’d first kissed Elvis I tuned out, and instead could only hear the bells of the cathedral, ringing out, loud and strong and tripping me out, my mind buzzing from the hashish. The cathedral bells pealed the tune that the song was based on, I suddenly made the connection, I felt a huge circle turning, from Julian to Ivy to me to eternity and back again, I laughed. Ivy grinned, the sun shone, the smell of engine oil from her Royal Enfield Bullet 500 mixed with the lavender in my hand and I hummed the song along with the distant tolling bells, they tolled for me. All shall be well I’m telling you, so during this Age of Covid-19 let’s all be exquisite and never explain.
