New words; buying books; mind maps

I learned two new words yesterday evening: leche-vitrine (windowlicking) is French for window shopping; llavero (Spanish) is the shorter male companion of a tall woman, think the Speaker and Mrs Bercow, President Sarkozy and Carla or Bernie Ecclestone and his former wife. It is derived from the word for a key, and literally means 'keyman', because the man's head as they walk side by side is at the level of the keys notionally hanging from the lady's belt. Talking of Amazons, I just ordered a friend's book, to be published in the US in early March. Delivery date was given as sometime in May. I reported this to the author who wondered if they are using a sailing boat. The explanation may be simpler and less romantic: I had clicked on the 'free super saver' delivery option. I am also waiting for the arrival via Amazon of The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, a thinly disguised memoir posing as a novel. I identified with the young heroine when I was in my late teens or early twenties. In those days, the early 1960's an avocado was a pretty rare and exotic vegetable, let alone the protagonist in the novel's chaotic (and then, to me, attractive) bohemian lifestyle. I am more enamoured of order now. As preparation for the discussion I volunteered to lead at St Dunstan's on Thursday (the day before yesterday), I cleared my mind by making three mind maps. One was of four interlocking circles labeled Moscow, Paris, Rome, London, the places where events took place or people were born, then lived in exile. Another one attempted to make sense of my theme with lots of lines connecting people. On the third, I divided a piece of paper into two sections headed 'Church and State' and 'Christianity'. Under these headings, sometimes across the central dividing line I wrote: icons, Russia, Art, individual, education, C.of E, family, Orthodoxy, murder, letters, places, Jews, exile, memory, poetry, saints, friends, and spies. At the bottom I wrote a remembered line from The Leopard: 'Sometimes, things must change in order that they remain the same'

A trip down memory lane

This evening I am leading a discussion at St Dunstan's in the West on the life and work of Father Alexander Men. What happened is this: William Gulliford, the vicar, asked me if I would like to choose a topic for one of his Thursday evening supper meetings. He leads 6pm vespers, then the five or six people who turn up go through to his little dining room/vestry with a kitchen, make supper (baked spuds, cold meat, fruit, cheese etc) and then go through to his cosy study for a sort of seminar.

First of all I suggested Dr Zhivago, some passages in Chapter One The Five O Clock Express but he talked me into Fr A Men. I have sent down to the church a box of the US Continuum edition of Christianity for the Twentyfirst Century - the Life and Work of Alexander Men (a book I co-edited with my friend Ann Shukman) which I rescued from being pulped at a few days’ notice, so that everyone can have a copy to take away.

When I was at my mother's house on Friday, I remembered that I had given a copy to her when it came out and searched high and low for it with no success. But what I did find was a copy of Awake to Life a cycle of Easter sermons given by Fr Alexander and published by my friend Robert Dudley's Bowerdean Press, which I have been reading. A card fell out, a colourful very retro Russian Easter card of two chicks pulling an Easter-egg shaped cart, with a note I had written when I gave it to her.

Finding Awake to Life brought back to me how Rob was involved, and so I will give him full credit for being the first to take up the torch, as it were. I should explain that Fr Alexander was the parish priest of Novaya Derevnya (in English 'New Village') northeast of Moscow on the road to Sergiev Posad the monastery town seat of the Patriarch so equivalent in that sense to Canterbury. Fr Alexander was in every way remarkable: he embodied the message of Christ, that true freedom is love. The 18 sermons often mention death, and he was murdered not long after he had baptised my elder daughter Abi, by dark forces of church and state analogous to those who cut down Thomas Beckett. At the suggestion of the Rev Chad Coussmaker, chaplain of our Embassy in Moscow and with the encouragement - in the shape of a commission promising a run at his theatre - of Dr Donald Smith,the Director of the Netherbow Theatre in Edinburgh, I adapted T S Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral with Mark Rozovsky, director of Moscow theatre At The Nikitsky Gates. Our version was entitled Murder in the Cathedral - a Russian Rehearsal. It was a great success and has toured Russia ever since, winning prizes. Mrs Valerie Eliot, T S's widow who owns the rights does not, however permit any use of her late husband's original material to be co-opted in this way, so this powerful telling of the murder of Fr Alexander has not been performed outside Russia. It is the birthday today of Gertrude Stein who once said: I am going to read what I have written to read, because in a general way it is easier even if it is not better and in a general way it is better even if it is not easier to read what has been written than to say what has not been written.'