Anna Jones Buttimore

In August 2004 I found myself single, obviously pregnant, and moving into a new LDS ward. Not an ideal situation, and one I was, naturally, somewhat embarrassed and self-conscious about. I was almost introducing myself to ward members with the words, "The divorce came through just two weeks ago!" But as luck would have it I had moved into the most wonderful ward in the world, and no one assumed, or judged, or speculated, or gossiped. Instead they set about making me feel welcome and threw me a house-warming party and then a baby shower - the first I'd ever had, despite it being my third baby. Shortly thereafter several members conspired to suggest a particular single man in the ward as worthy of my attention and Roderic and I married in the London Temple in August 2006. Anyway, the point of all this is that I know what it's like to be single in a church which values marriage above almost everything else, but only just. So I cast my mind back to those months...

Around this time last year I unleashed a fiendish plan on my unsuspecting family and friends. I told them that we weren't going to spend more than £2 ($3) on any adult at Christmas, and they were similarly limited in their gift budgets for us. We wanted people to make things, give service, or regift old items to us instead. And we would do the same for them. The idea was that rather than Christmas being a financial burden and a commercial exercise it would become a time we could focus more on the Saviour. Well, Christmas came and went, and now people are asking me, "How did it go, that cheap Christmas thing?" And the answer is that it went really, really well. I got some gifts which I was absolutely thrilled with. A friend knitted me a beautiful bag. My father-in-law gave me some delicious home-made marmalade. I got lots of elastics for my hair which is fantastic because I am forever losing them, and my husband's best friend used his DIY skills to build a bookca...

Medi, always a basket case. Just before midnight last night my cat, Medi, passed away. She was just a few weeks shy of her 21st birthday and over the last year or two had been getting increasingly thin and frail. So all plans for today's blog have been deferred, and instead this is a self-indulgent eulogy to my cat. In May 1992 I was 23 and living with my new (now ex) husband in our own home for the first time. I had wanted a cat for a long time, so after seeing an advert in the local newspaper I drove to a modern housing estate just a mile from where we lived in Caernarfon where a semi-feral cat had adopted a sympathetic home in order to have her kittens. Apparently she did this every year, and once homes had been found for the kittens the cat would disappear into the wild again. The homeowners named her Nionyn (local Welsh dialect for "Onion") and had nicknamed her three black kittens Mini, Midi and Maxi. I paid them £5 and took eight-week-old Midi home in a box w...