(£7.99), containing instructions for making a range of things from household junk. There is also a huge choice of craft kits from an online outlet, ethicalsuperstore.com. There are various marionettes to make includ- ing Santa and Rudolph figures at £11.95 and purses in cotton with appliqué owl or elephant (£9.95). In the end, I chose an imaginative craft project from the Unicef website. Called the World Houses Craft Kit, it contains instructions to make four homes from around the world plus a story booklet (£9.95). Teens can be tough to buy for, but I imagine


14-year-old Tom likes sport and gadgets. A Unite water bottle from Unicef would be one possibility. Priced at £8.50, it is made of alu- minium with a plastic screw cap and mouthpiece. Perhaps more exciting is Oxfam’s Trevor Bayliss Mini Eco-Pro torch (£11.99) with wind up mechanism and a bright red wind-up FM radio with football logo (£12.99). My favourite, though, is the H20 water-powered can clock (£9.99). It looks like a transparent drinks can with LCD display, comes in four bright colours and is activated by adding water to the body of the can. One can of water powers the clock for up to 12 months before it needs to be refilled. I found various stockists online including ecogreenstore.co.uk and Oxfam, which charges £12.99 for it.


potions. There is Castagnette (£9.20), a mas- sage oil of chestnut extract with lavender produced by the Trappist nuns of Maria Frieden Abbey in Germany, and Classic Cologne Vapo (£9.51), which blends essences from plants harvested in the Midi region of France or Africa, and is made by Benedictine nuns at Chantelle Abbey, Auvergne, who also produce a box of three soaps (£8.20) enriched with calendula and karite butter. But in the end I went for a soft fleece scarf (£12.50) available in more than a dozen colours and made by the Carmelite nuns in Laval, France. As for Dick (79), the Chantelle Sisters have


F


an aftershave for sensitive skin (£13.79), described as having a fruity fragrance with hints of wood and amber. There is also the Chartreuse Elixir (£12.70), said to contain the extract of 130 medicinal and aromatic plants and made according to instructions set out in a manuscript of 1737 by the Carthusians at La Grande Chartreuse in France. A few drops in water or a hot toddy are recommended for “weariness, queasiness or indisposition”. Traidcraft has a smart brown leather travel wallet (£14) produced by a rehabilitation cen- tre run by people still suffering from the effects of the Bhopal gas disaster in India. If that is too steep, there is a smaller wallet (£7), also made at Bhopal, of recycled tyres. My total spend on the above gifts came to


£77.43. Since that does not include postage and packing, I would imagine that would take care of the rest of my £100 budget and per- haps that would still leave enough for some recycled gift wrap. Mission accomplished.


or Liz (74), I went straight to the Buckfast Abbey monastic shop (buckfast.org.uk), which has a wealth of luscious-sounding lotions and


LAURENCE FREEMAN


‘Just as we feel proud of human altruism, so we feel degraded by inhumanity’


You’d never mistake it for a gentleman farmer’s showpiece. Two parked trailers, tumbledown barn, a farmyard littered with pipes, crates, tools, sacks of things and piles of the rushes she uses for her weaving – a place of daily industry. It is home and workplace for a remarkably gifted basket weaver and her partner, eccentric if you met them in a city or suburb but manifesting rare sanity here, in a small island community. A desert father once remarked: “the time is coming when people will go mad and then they will point to a sane person and say he is mad because he is not like us.” It always renews your joy and hope to meet truly sane people, but today you have to be prepared for their not looking sane. The weaver brims over with energy and a robust humour. She has an earthy way of holding eye contact; not, you feel, because she learned this from a management course but because she is interested in you as part of the world she inhabits. The yard and adjoining field are


filled with horses, dogs, cats, chickens, goats. As the weaver’s partner came to greet me, I noticed a lamb come round the barn, too, following him. I asked him if he was now keeping sheep as well. It seemed odd that the lamb continued to approach us, as sheep don’t ordinarily bond with people as closely as parables suggest. I noticed it was also walking somewhat oddly, unsteady on its wobbly four legs as if someone had slipped something into its grain that morning. It stopped beside us, like a child clinging to its parent, or a dog seeking company and exuded the emotional bonding that makes us feel that dogs love us. It looked at me looking at it, with the same directness as its protectors, and seemed to say, “I am not an ordinary lamb.” I asked its human spokesman who said, yes, it was an odd little creature. The weaver had cared for it round the clock when shortly after birth it seemed set to die. It was diagnosed with meningitis, inflammation of the brain and spinal cord. Later I looked it up and found that this was indeed an illness of sheep. My book on sheep disease says that “the affected lamb can’t stand and its rear quarter


is weak. The brain is infected. Antibiotics may help but the prognosis is guarded.” This particular lamb had beaten the odds and was moreover assured of a caring environment for the rest of its days. However expendable in the war of evolution, on the battlefield of nature, it would always be safe here. There was something incurably sane and significant about this human care for a damaged member of another species. The breaking news that day was about the printer cartridge bombs discovered in the freight of some airplanes. They had also been carried on passenger flights and seemed intended for the slaughter of hundreds of individuals in whom, (un)naturally, the perpetrators of the murder had no interest personally. Their only importance was as sacrificial victims, like the lambs slaughtered in the Temple or “collateral damage” in any war. Perhaps what shocks and terrifies us most about terrorism is its inhuman impersonality. Part of the terror is that it proves how far the human can regress from itself, not merely into the pre-human but into a total degeneration of its own nature, something that nothing else in the natural world is capable of. However much we condemn it, we are implicated and accused by the simple fact of its occurrence. If “they” can do this, could not I? Natural human empathy is inverted. Just as we feel proud when we hear of human courage and altruism, so we feel humiliated and degraded by inhumanity. Security experts say that an expert bomb maker is like a painter. He has a personal style that makes him stand out. How like art, in some Halloween inversion of holiness, the skills of destructions are. We speak of the “art of war” and divert the creative imagination from works that bless to those that maim with maximum efficiency. My weaver friend and her brain-damaged lamb seem so eccentric and marginal beside this scale of violence. The stony-heartedness of those inflamed with hatred seems undefeatable beside the silly, sublime, tender care a human can give an ovine invalid. What can cure the inflamed mind of a terror merchant and turn his heart of stone to flesh except infinitely more of the weaver’s wasted love.


■The World Community for Christian Meditation, of which Laurence Freeman OSB is director, has recently opened a new outreach programme, Meditatio (http://www.wccmmeditatio.org).


6 November 2010 | THE TABLET | 15


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