Monday 7 January. Day 222

Awake at 6am, so time for a cup of tea and a fag before meditation. I watched Infinity last night, about Hardy and the Indian maths genius Ramachandran. Beautiful film. Had a surprisingly happy ending (for me) - I always thought Ramachandran died in England and never went back to India. In the film he does go home, having been made a Fellow of the Royal Society and Trinity, and is reunited with his wife. He dies a year later, from TB. I thought they'd made it up, but it was true. She lived to a ripe old age, but never remarried. Jeremy Irons very good as Hardy.

Smoking, hanging out of the window with my cup of tea, listening to Today. Not for long, glad I can't even be tempted in BV. Talking to HH last night about smoking. It is my gift to myself, and B, and BV, and I'm silly really - two easy weeks not smoking were a gift too, and I've only made it harder for myself starting up again. I have to take it as seriously as being sober, and use the same tricks. It's good that Belle picks me up on it - she noticed straight away that I had stopped  reporting my days, but hasn't said anything more. I was quite bolshy with her. I'll finish the pack of tobacco I bought yesterday, and start again.

Strange bolt from the blue, a message from Anita from Stockholm, at midnight, whom I last met on Naxos on my last drinking holiday there, I think, or maybe it was the previous one. She's just come back from 3 weeks in the Cyclades, and went to Naxos for a few days.

Talked on the 'phone to B. A strangely quiet low key chat. She'd been out to the country with friends for a walk and had a nice day. She's working today, and tomorrow, and starts her proper job next Monday once she's got her security paperwork sorted out for Swisscom. Wonder what she'll be transcribing - phone taps in Schwyz. I think we're both exhausted after our sojourn in Barcelona, need peace and quiet and stability.

I had a good day. A long letter to Suzanne from the Fram mindfulness group, all about my year at BV. Notes on HH's list of things to think about BV and living in community. Messaged Bob Perry and left a post on Loadup about the move. Going to go round the house this morning with HH and list all the stuff to pack and move and then visit Mina at the office in St Marks to look at the paperwork for the last move and see what is in store, and where. Very quiet. A lovely comfortable house. Talked to FS about babysitting and car hire in February.

Lovely to meditate with HH, and say the Office. I thought this morning, I've been trying to grab the fruit (as always), of romantic sexual love, and ignoring the root, where all this comes from, good and bad, joy and pain. That that was what Barcelona was teaching, really, and how we should have meditated, or at least I should have done, as B expected me to do, and as I very deliberately didn't - let's try this the old way, and it doesn't work, and never did. That the route to bliss is not through the lover and the beloved, but with her, beside her, even perhaps without her. That everything just started to get out of whack (and so fast) when I lose that essential daily reboxing of the compass, the constant reminder of what is real, what is the source, and that all the joy and delight and pain and frustration is just ephemera, appearances, morning mist, night fogs. That the reflection of the moon in the puddle is just that, a reflection, not the reality.

And how powerful the psalms are, how they set one up for meditation, are even a meditation themselves (HH has a tendency to gabble, she knows them by heart, and has lots to get on and do.

I've asked Sophie S for her address, found a Meditatio programme for 2019 last night, they have a day on Meister Eckhart which I thought she might like. Also one on Dom John Chapman which I would love to go to. They do sort of concede that there is more to Christian mysticism and meditation than John Main and WCCM - acknowledge Tom Keating and Thomas Merton, no mention of Richard Rohr - but somehow imply that John Chapman, who died in 1933 and whom Placid told me to read, was only 'a forerunner of the re-discovery of the contemplative way'. The key thing that John Main did, and Tom Keating too, was to bring contemplative prayer out of the monastery and give it to the whole world. That funny concern of Cyprian Smith, in the The Way of Paradox: Spiritual Life as Taught by Meister Eckhart, that Eckhart's mysticism and meditation was only for the initiates and the elect, that it was too dangerous to be practiced by mere mortals. Sent that to Sophie too.

WCCM seems at times like AA - this is the way, the only way, and if you don't do it this way, our way, you're doomed (cf LF's disparaging remark about Julian groups years ago). Perhaps LF really doesn't know. Or he's afraid of the competition, wants to protect his brand.

And I wonder if I'd kept up with daily meditation in Sant Sever, if I'd have started smoking again.

And I'm finding difficult to breathe and my blood pressure's right up. doh.