gym

The Flat, 18.41.

The preacher stands at the pulpit with a smile as bright as the sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows behind him. He does not look the type, dressed in a blue hoodie and an oversized black baseball cap with the word “King” emblazoned in white capitals upon its front, but there is no mistaking the fervour of his faith when he speaks. He sees me, a newcomer, take a seat toward the back of the church and introduces himself immediately. He makes a point of singling me out for a special welcome in the introductory prayers. Half of the worship is in song form. They’re easy enough, but I recognise none of them. There is a testimony from one of the congregation, a passionate sermon on the theme of Pentecost, the partial revelation of a prophecy and one last unfamiliar worship song. As the service draws to a close, the preacher offers us the chance to come up for prayer – the laying on of hands. I feel it may be targeted at me and I briefly consider staying behind. It isn’t shyness that changes my mind – I am not the child I used to be – but a sense that this isn’t the place. As I leave, the preacher races to the door to bid me farewell. He must have moved fast; I could have sworn he had his back to the congregation when I got up to leave.

He has done all the right things to make me feel at home. But he cannot contend with the empty chairs and empty tables. Ruefully, I concede defeat, and cross another option off the list. I am seeking my generation, church by church, and struggling to find them.

I am thirty-one years old, Catholic, and looking for a spiritual community around my age in Somerset – and not having much luck. I am in the wilderness. The search for a church continues.

Since moving here a couple of years ago, I have flirted with the idea of having a church of my own. I left a friendly community behind when I left my last school, though by the nature of it being a school-based religious community, I was rather hoping that striking out somewhere new might give me the chance to meet others my own age in a setting removed from work. As ever, it seems, I have been swimming against the current of my generation. While the millennial salmon run crowds the concrete streams of London, I have ventured downstream for a change of scenery – so it should have come as no surprise that all the young folks I might have hoped to meet are long gone. On my head be it. However, I had hoped that the church might provide.

Sadly, this is not the case. I have tried quite a few churches around Taunton now, and everywhere I go it is the same story. A handful of young families – children under ten – and a slightly larger gathering of pensioners, but no middle line. In many cases, more than half of the congregation consists of immigrant families, who seem to be keeping our churches in business with their comparatively strong belief. The demographic that sits somewhere between twenty and forty, however, is nowhere to be found. They aren’t in the Catholic Church. They aren’t in the Anglican Church, and they aren’t even among the evangelicals. Where are they?

The simple answer, I suppose, is that they aren’t in Taunton. My friends in London and Edinburgh had larger and younger communities in their churches, this much is true, but those are the capital cities of their respective countries, so I feel they may be anomalies. The struggle I face here in Taunton is, perhaps, merely symptomatic of a far greater spiritual decline across the country, and my generation – with whom I have always been at odds – seem to have been leading the exodus all along.

I should preface this with a home truth or two. I am, by all accounts, a pretty poor Christian. I sin, I don’t go to church on Sundays and I don’t lead a Christ-centred life. I draw more strength from my prayers to the Virgin Mary than I do to those I make to Jesus, since I associate her so closely with the wellspring of light that is El Rocío. I am no evangelist, having a fierce aversion to the belief that there is only one truth, and I certainly don’t hold by the idea that salvation is a concept reserved for God’s chosen. In that sense, I am just as guilty of picking and choosing with the scriptures as the next man. However, in spite of these contradictions – and contrary to so many my age – I choose to believe. I have my doubts, of course, but I choose to believe precisely because I doubt. That is why it is called faith.

I wish I had others my age I could bounce these ideas off, but they are proving hard to find. While I worked at my previous school, I was living inside a bubble – but out here, in the real world, the faithful are on the retreat. A recent survey conducted by the Pew Reseach Center found that the UK now ranks among the top seven countries globally where no religion holds sway over the others, with the number of people identifying as Christian down from 71% in 2001 to 46% in 2026. In the past, most of us simply ticked the “Church of England” box on such surveys because we’d been baptised, whether we were practising Christians or not. These days – quite reasonably, I might add – there’s a lot more people questioning why they have to identify as something which has no meaning to them whatsoever.

The trouble is, for hundreds of years, going to church on a Sunday has never been about deepening your faith for the average Joe. There have always been more sceptics than true believers, I am sure, and for every prayer sent to the heavens over the last two thousand years, there must have been at least two or three sideways glances. What the church did provide – what it still does provide – is community. It takes a village to raise a family, as the saying goes, and at its best, the spiritual community generated quite naturally by a gathering of the faithful must have been a family like no other.

Which is why, every time I enter a new church, it breaks my heart a little to see all those empty chairs, and the front rows occupied only by the elderly, as though the gift of faith comes included with one’s pension and bus pass at the age of sixty-five.

I must confess myself a hypocrite at this junction. Spiritual growth has nothing to do with age, and there is much I could learn from my elders. But my heart longs for a community of kindred spirits, and my career in education only makes that longing for contemporaries all the keener. I spend six days out of seven and seven months out of twelve working with people less than half and more than twice my age. In much the same way that babies forge instant connections with others of the same age whom they perceive to be equals, it would be nice to meet some people of my own age for a change.

Where have they gone? Why have we traded away something that was once so central to our world? Everywhere I look in the news, it is all of woe. Frustration and rage against the situation in Israel and Palestine and the role of religion at its heart. Mental health concerns on the rise. Young people (like myself) exhausted with modern dating and struggling to find partners, despite there being more options than ever before. A generation obsessed with the way that it looks. A generation obsessed with itself.

I imagine I would have more luck finding people my own age if I joined a gym, since that seems to be the altar at which the millennials worship. But I cannot, will not set foot in one of those places. I have never been much of a sportsman (understatement of the millennium), but while I recognise their value in keeping an increasingly industrial community healthy, I fear for their impact on our children. Unchecked, they can twist a person’s self-image beyond recognition – and, sometimes, they can distrort the very person themselves. The idea that we might have traded a free community based around love, faith and spiritual growth for a subscription-based hall of mirrors unsettles me deeply.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with a healthy fitness routine – you cannot look after others unless you look after yourself, after all. But by throwing out God, the Church and the community that went with all of it, we have left ourselves with nothing but our own autonomy – and that is not all it is cracked up to be. We are sociable animals by design. To deprive us of that is, in the words of John Wyndham, “to maim us, to outrage [our] nature”.

I am speaking to the void. There is nobody here who can temper my spiritual ennui. And that is precisely the point I am getting at. But I will keep searching. I must. She may be out there, it is true, but she is proving hard to find, so before I find her, I should like to find a community with whom to share my faith.

The current is fierce. The tide is coming in and the dry land around my feet is receding, I know. But I remain hopeful. Hope, as ever, is my polestar. I will find you someday, I swear it. BB x

It’s been an interesting year. No, more than that, it’s been the very best of years. Not even that terrifying Monday primary class can put a damper on it. Incidentally, autocorrect suggested pterodactyl instead of primary, which is probably a very accurate description of the atmosphere. But like I said, that class alone has had next to no major impact on the year as a whole. As far as me goes, I think it’s been a resounding success.

This morning I found myself, for the first time, feeling genuinely fluent… and that was in the middle of giving a bilingual art class to a visiting school group from Romania, whose English was, in all likelihood, streets ahead of their Spanish. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to translate on the go, and being thrown the most dastardly terms that Dadaist impressionist art jargon can supply was a serious challenge, but one that I lapped right up. But that’s not the real crux: it’s that I’ve started getting tenses, idioms and (more crucially) agreements right without even thinking. It’s easy to think that the four-month point is the peak of language acquisition and after that it’s just vocab, vocab, vocab, but lately I’ve come to realize that the shoemakers’ elves have been at work and my grammar has been improving on the sly – which is grand, though it has made me wonder more than once whether I’m wasting £9000 a year and more on tuition fees if all I had to do to improve my Spanish was to come out here.

That’s a healthy dose of good news, because I was cut off from my principal means of improving my Spanish earlier this year. Or rather, I cut myself off. In a mirror-move of last year, I’ve fallen head over heels in love, had my heart broken and considered then walked away from a potential relationship over a niggling feeling that, as before, something simply wasn’t right. Story of my life, really. No matter how much I think, no matter how hard I try, I’m simply not cut out for the word casual. It’s not in my blood. Like my mother, I fill my every second with a job or project of some kind, be it work, writing or some other task to stave off sloth. I couldn’t ever commit any less than one hundred percent to anything, and though I’ve tried to convince myself of the ridiculousness of such a stubborn attitude, that’s something I can’t change. Whoever She is, she’ll be the kind of girl who gives a hundred percent back. Balance is key, and I’ve had my fill of one-sided love affairs. A couple of old friends I met over the Christmas holidays told me they’d reached the stage where they no longer have time for people who have no time for them. I thought it a rather selfish statement at first, but now I see the wisdom in it. After all, there’s no use in chasing stars over the horizon.

At the core of everything, but especially relationships – and I’m speaking from pitiful ignorance, as usual – is learning to love yourself. Love yourself and others will love you. That’s what they say. And loving yourself is no easy task.

I don’t think I’ve been truly happy with myself since I was fourteen; before girls, before exams and long before stepping out into the wide world (though I’ll make a three-month exception for that brief stint in Uganda). Physically, at least, I’ve always had complaints; why am I so small, why did I get the worst of my parents’ genes, why can’t I squat like an Arab without falling over… Petty, every one of them.

I’m also probably rather unhealthy compared to most of my generation, in that I don’t practice any kind of sport whatsoever (besides the occasional ridiculous trek). As I used to whine as a toddler, it’s not in my interest. And in my books, anything that’s not in my interest simply isn’t worth my time (until it is in my interest, of course, when suddenly I have to be exceedingly good at it). The gym doesn’t appeal to me – just hearing people bang on about their gym routine makes me want to jump down a rabbit hole – and though I’ve tried more than once, anything close to a workout routine tends to peter out after a few weeks because I get no enjoyment from it. The best I ever managed was those two months in Jordan, and that was only because Andrew stoically refused to let me back down. Left to my own devices, though, I’m my own worst enemy when it comes to sport. I’m simply not one of those people who gets a kick out of working up a sweat. I never have been. It’s only pure fear of what may become of me in the future that’s making me reconsider; now, when I should be at my physical prime.

So I have physical issues. That should come as no surprise. Fortunately, I’m either too stubborn or too indifferent to let them do me any emotional damage. Sure, I’ll probably have to start running soon, and that’s no bad thing. Especially in a country like Spain, where the food is a graver threat than terrorism. At least I eat well here.

This stream-of-consciousness was brought home to me by my headmaster in class this afternoon, when he whimsically commented that if I were a woman I’d be ‘marriage material’; “…this boy can draw, he can sing, he can dance, act, write, and he knows all of the names of the birds. He does everything”.

Yes, I basically got indirectly proposed to by my headmaster. Will this madness ever end?

But he was wrong. I don’t do everything. I happen to dabble in the arts, and whilst I consider myself reasonably accomplished in a few fields, there’s so many normal things I can’t do. Like mathematics. Or asking for help. Or driving. Or football. Or skiing. Or any other sport, for that matter. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s only because I’m so forthright with what I can do that I get by at all in this world. Because singing, drawing and writing are all well and good, but they don’t put food on the table – especially when you refuse to go mercenary.

Nonetheless, I’ve learned an important lesson this year, and that’s that I’m at my very best when I’m on my own. Jordan showed me that when there’s a crutch, I’ll use it, almost without thinking. That’s why I struck out for Spain alone, and why I’ll be doing the same in Morocco come June. Being alone forces you to work on yourself, which is never a bad thing, and allows you to truly live for you. I’ve been able to do so much this year, more than I ever thought I’d accomplish in eight months, and that makes me happy indeed. I still haven’t decided how much that’s got to do with being independent at last and how much it’s simply about living in my grandfather’s country. On a purely superficial level, I’d like to think the latter holds more weight.

I may not love myself quite as much for the time being as I should – that, like so much else, will come with time – and, dream though I may, until I am I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for a relationship, but simply being in Spain fills me up to the very top with all the energy I need to survive. Before, I’ve looked to others as charisma batteries, people from whom I could draw that precious life energy when mine was running low. Here I get it for free, right from the earth. And better still, I’ve learned how to manufacture that energy.

It’s the Spanish language. Nothing more, nothing less. Simply speaking in my grandfather’s tongue seems to be enough. If ever I truly love myself, it’s when I’m gesturing away in ehpañó. The earthy appeal of the semi-unintelligible southern accent is a serious draw for me, but it’s something about the raw dynamism of the language itself that really clicks, like a gear that’s been missing all my life. Here it’s functional, regularly oiled and, more importantly, spinning in its place. The very definition of perpetual motion.

So that’s the answer. I’ve simply got to come back and live here for good. The road to true happiness is hard to find, but I’ve found the map, at least, in both senses of the wording . The key is in the language itself. Perhaps it always has been. BB x