Year 3 – cherry tree house

Earlier this year, Lucy sent me ‘Metaphysical Animals’ in the post. It profiles the philosophers Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley, and details the relationships between all four. Being contemporaries in the same academic field, their relationships are complex.

In one particularly memorable incident, Elizabeth uses Iris’ room while she is away to make herring soup with a friend. They sieve the soup through a silk scarf given to Iris for her birthday. Somehow the smell of the soup is so distasteful that Iris gets thrown out by her landlady. And yet, the friendship survives, even when the scarf doesn’t.

Herring-soup Elizabeth is the same Elizabeth who challenges Oxford University when they decide to grant Harry Truman an honorary degree. Anscombe makes a powerful objection on the basis of Truman’s use of the atomic bomb. In her speech she says “to choose to kill the innocent as a means to one’s ends is murder”. Anscombe’s audacity bridges both the personal and the political.

Mary Midgely understood this. She says “philosophy is best understood as a form of plumbing”. It’s “a way in which we service the deep infrastructure of our lives – the patterns that are taken for granted because they have not really been questioned”. I’m rather fond of this description.

This year has felt like a lot of plumbing work. January and February navigating a work restructure and a housemate moving out felt hard.

Happily since then, steadier ground has emerged. A new role with challenge and scope to learn. Strength training that led to my first 10k obstacle course and multi-day bike ride. Beautiful times with friends at Welsh libraries, Spanish festivals and in a Buxton cottage.

This year I’ve been learning – after Midgely – to plumb routinely.

Sometimes change creates natural points to take a look at how your life is set up and if it matches what you value. Other times, we need to find the rhythms and routines that help us to do this. As Elizabeth Oldfield writes, “ideals need structure.” You can’t just believe in friendship or integrity or peace – you have to build the actual systems that make those things possible. The philosophical plumbing work is figuring out what you want your life to support, and then creating the practical structures to make it happen.

One of the shifts I’ve noticed in my own plumbing endeavours this year, is in learning that enabling right relationships doesn’t mean ‘preserving relationships at any cost.’ Sometimes letting others let you go – and letting yourself let others go – is the healthiest thing for everyone involved. I’ve found both to be painful.

Returning to the story of Anscombe, I’m always drawn to how she moved between the personal and political with the same unflinching attention. She once said her Catholic faith was “much a worldly, social, political affair as it is a supernatural one”.

The war-mongering of 2025 means I’m thinking more about what is required from me in wider contexts too. I’m not content that the truck industry I work on is smug about growing revenues from defense, or that there’s work happening in my city on nuclear warheads. It doesn’t always feel clear-cut, but it never was for Anscombe and co. either.

Fleming Rutledge writes about how we engage with biblical stories: “I just keep turning and turning the kaleidoscope, inhabiting the story as the cycle of the year unfolds.” We don’t solve them once, she says, but we inhabit them. This feels essential to the work of plumbing. You don’t fix relationships or respond to moral complexity once and declare the job finished. You keep showing up with your tools, examining what needs attention, making the adjustments that are actually within your reach.

2016. 2017. 2018. 2019. 2020. 2021. 2022. 2023. 2024.