Wednesday 4th july

At times it has seemed that I had the patience of a saint; for all those years waiting for Grandma to acknowledge me as a fully fledged grown-up.  Well,saintly or not, my patience was not rewarded, almost the last words she said to me were dismissing me a spoilt little minx, hardly the acceptance of an equal at all.  But looking back, was my virtue one of patience, or simply one of biting one’s lip, as so often the words I wished to say remained locked firmly in my brain, rattling round and round, but unspoken they only had the power to build up my resentment, and the only one who suffered was me.  So what was so saintly about that?  And anyway, where did this idea of saints being patient come from.  Many of the older saints have been anything but patient, quite the opposite in many cases. And it is patently obvious that in fact all does not come to those who sit and wait.  Those who rush in impatiently and grab whatever they can usually succeed in this life, so in reality patience is not a virtue but rather a crime of negligence, almost akin to laziness, or stubbornness.  And in the case of saints, with the incredibly slow processes of the Catholic church, the patience is in the long wait until they are actually canonized.  Unlike the world of celebrity, which is the new and true religion, where saints are created (no-one simply emerges these days) in days and weeks, and rise to the firmament like shooting stars, streaking across the heavens in their upward trajectory.  True, they usually fizzle and fall to earth like spent fireworks, but most relished the attention while it lasted.  Patience is nowhere rewarded today; stay in a job for more than three years and you are a stick-in-the-mud; those who wait patiently on the backbenches never get picked for high office, and if you sit at home waiting for the right man to come along, forget it – his appearance will rival that of a blue moon, better get down to the clubs and shake your booty if you want to get spotted.  And if you want the world to change then you will truly have to have the patience of a saint – you are in for a long wait.