Pastoral Letter for the Month

 There are some months when a pastoral letter almost writes itself – but not every month. Specifically: not this month.

Usually I can rely on The Grumpy Cat to do something entertaining, or at least to disapprove of something I’ve done – but sightings of that particular feline this month have been very scant. 

On a couple of occasions something resembling a tabby tornado has barrelled across the garden, apparently in a hurry to get somewhere important, perhaps to catch a bus or watch the news. 

The lack of it prowling around looking fed up is, to be truthful, a little worrying. The Grumpy Cat appears to be the oldest of the cats that pass through our garden and if this is a sign of a growing reluctance to leave the comfort of its home then I’m going to have to find something else to write about. 

There are other cats, a leggy black and white youngster who has walked the same path so often that the grass has worn down so that you can see exactly where he walks. He’s the most charming of our feline visitors – and has a particular love for the rain water that gathers in a seed tray near our back door. Most evenings he appears there for a drink – sometimes he prefers to dip his paw into the water and lick it off delicately – other times he just crouches down and laps it up. 

There’s another, older black and white cat who is a bit of a rascal, and who I do not encourage to saunter through the garden. 

For a while she decided to favour a portion of our lawn as a preferred toilet spot – that continued until we started pouring coffee grounds on the grass. On balance, we decided, we’d rather have a lawn that smelled faintly of coffee, than the alternative. 

Or possibly I could write about the garden birds – our favourite of which is a tiny Gold Crest, “It’s the smallest bird in the country,” my wife told me. “How do you know?” I said. “Have you measured it?” 2 “I don’t mean this exact one,” she said. “I mean, generally.” 

The other small birds are charming too – finches, tits, wrens, and warblers among them. There’s also a territorial robin – who keeps himself busy chasing other birds away. 

When I was young my granddad used to try and interest me in bird watching– I couldn’t summon up any enthusiasm for it, really, but perhaps I was too young. 

Appreciation of such things seems to come easier now that I’m, probably, not massively younger than he was when he tried to encourage me to keep a list of birds I’d seen. I still don’t keep a list, though, but I do have an app that will identify birds by their call. 

Times change, don’t they. People change – I’m not the same person I was when I arrived in Hull – and I will be a different person this time next year. Each experience we have changes us, it opens up new ideas, new possibilities, or perhaps it shuts down old ones. 

“Ultimately we’re not so much human beings, we’re more like… human becomings…” I said to my children once. “Whatever dad,” they wisely replied. I was right though. 

Every conversation, every new idea that we’re exposed to, changes us in some way or other. We might appear to be the same, but we’re changing all the time. We’re always becoming. 

There’s something helpful about recognising that everything is changing all the time. It can help us remember that things which seem like they’re permanent really aren’t. Sometimes I like to give people pebbles to hold – I encourage them to feel the solidity of the stone, to see how permanent it feels. Then I remind them that not only does this stone come from a much bigger stone, or lump of rock, that has been broken down over time, but within the pebble there are trillions of atoms, each of them a tiny ball of motion. The pebble might feel hard and permanent – but it is really in a constant state of change. 

There’s something very comforting about that – the hard things in life, no matter how big, or indeed how small, will pass away eventually. 

Only one thing remains the same – The Grumpy Cat, wherever it is, will always be grumpy. 

Simon