And the dance goes on!

Dear dancers, please pardon my silence. Mr McLean and I have decided that we must move from our lovely little upper villa to a home friendlier to wheelchairs, and so I have had no time for writing, let alone dancing. We have been looking at ground-floor flats and bungalows and even conventional houses, and when we found a nice bungalow down our street and around the corner, we pounced.

Now we must sell our flat, which has meant cleaning it and tidying the garden, which is all a lot for a man who can’t walk and his wife, so we recruited help, predominantly from the pro-dance Catholic community, and now the garden is respectable and may even become lovely. We are very grateful to our friends.

I have had an enquiry about the Michaelmas dance, which will be on September 27, 2025, at Edinburgh’s Dean Hall, where it was last year. There will be dance workshops in the Dean 2, which is in the same ex-church, the three Sundays previous to this dance. This Sunday afternoon (June 22) there will be a swing-dance workshop for Mrs McLean’s Waltzing Party habitués in the St. Andrew’s Ravelston parish hall.

To be continued when I return from the gardening centre!

Friendship

I’m home and thinking about friendship.

I made a joke about matchmaking today but hastened to say that I am not a fan of matchmaking events. Gatherings for young Catholics, for example, should be for young Catholics in general, not young SINGLE Catholics. Chances are, most Catholics under 25, say, are going to be single anyway, but why divide them from their engaged and married friends? Their married peers model marriage, after all, just as their peers in the priesthood and religious life model those states in life. Gathering single Catholics just to be single together doesn’t make sense to me, if matchmaking is what you are up to.

My belief is that events organized for Catholics, old and/or young, should foster friendship, above all. Too many young men and women see young women and men not as themselves, unique individuals with interesting jobs, studies or hobbies, loved by God, but as—. Well, since we’re talking about Catholics, as potential spouses.

Now, that’s a good and lovely thing. But it shouldn’t be the first thing. The first thing should be getting to know people for who they are, not solely in relation to you, but in relation to themselves, their families and their friends. I am very much trying to return myself to the shoes of a single woman as I write this, but I can’t help thinking that I was introduced to Mr McLean by friends, that our meeting in person coincided with his reception into the Church and my holiday trip to Edinburgh, and that his TLM friends kept inviting us together to dinner parties. (I had also thought, after listening to him talk non-stop for days, that he really needed a nice Traditional Catholic Girl to take care of him, and Jesuit-Educated I was becoming envious of this hypothetical creature.) We had become, between our initial online introduction and our bus station meeting, penpals of a very 21st sort, and as he had a beard and an overly loud tweed jacket, I was sure we were going to stay just friends.

I had good training in staying just friends with young men when I was at theology school because most of the unmarried men around were male religious. I very badly wanted to get married, so that was a a bit of a challenge, but it was also very good for me. It meant seeing men for who they were and not who I might want them to be.

The concept of the “friend zone,” like so much in modern social life, is intensely stupid. I certainly hope my young friends find their spouses among their own friends and not get beglamoured by smooth-taking strangers with no friends or family of their own as far as my friends are concerned. Mr McLean came as part and parcel of a family and a community, and I did, too, although–alas–I don’t see as much of either as I would like. (This, by the way, is something to consider if you fall on love with someone abroad.)