Daily Religious Prayers

These form an important part in all religions. In Hinduism, Sandhyavandanam is enjoined thrice a day at morning, noon & evening. In Islam, Namaz is to be conducted five times a day. But barring a few minor changes regarding the time in which they are conducted, the text remains substantially the same.

In William Law's "A Serious Call to a Devout & Holy life", he suggests that one should rise early in the morning & pray preferably in a place set apart for that purpose. This first prayer of the day should be a thanksgiving to God for giving us a fresh day for offering to Him all that one may have, for his service & glory & then proceed to express various divine attributes of God. Singing Psalms (devotional songs) will be a necessary beginning of devotions, which should be done fasting at this time.

The next hour of praying should be at nine in the morning, the subject being the practice of humility, & guard against the sin of pride. Law also mentions that importantly Christianity requires us to live contrary to the world.

Next devotion at twelve noon should have universal love as the subject. As a corollary of this, one should intercede with God for our fellow creatures.

Next devotion should be at three in the afternoon, the subject being resignation to the Will of God in all our actions & designs.

Evening prayer at six should consist of examining our heart & confessing all our sins.

These prayers can be performed mentally, even if one is at work (except the singing of Psalms on rising in the morning.)

The last prayer of the day just before going to bed should be a thanksgiving for the gift of the day & meditate on death, the inevitable, which sleep resembles.

Law concludes that celibacy & voluntary poverty are not necessary to arrive at perfection. But if practiced, will take one to perfection safely & quickly.

Valets in English Literature

Valets were a unique phenomenon in English Upper Class Society in the early part of the 20th century. They were personal attendants to the male nobility, mostly attending to their clothes.

The most famous of them, Jeeves is a valet to Bertie Wooster, immortalised by P. G. Wodehouse in his numerous novels about the duo. Jeeves is a member of the Junior Ganymede Club. (Ganymede is a satellite of Jupiter, the biggest planet. In Greek mythology, Ganymede is the loveliest of mortals & selected as the cup bearer of Zeus.) He proves his indispensability by  extricating his master from various scrapes.

Mervyn Bunter, the valet of Lord Wimsey, a creation of Dorothy Sayers, was Wimsey's Batman during the first world war & saved his life there. After the war, he joined Wimsey's service. Bunter's skills include cooking, photography & impeccable dress sense. He is forever acquiring state-of-art photographic equipment, which he uses in his master's service, whenever called for. He also attends auctions & picks up rare first editions in his master's absence, on his instructions.

The most interesting of these is neither a man nor a valet in the conventional sense, but a "pretty paragon of a parlour-maid", Doris Foljambe, who looks after Georgie Pillson, in the Mapp & Lucia novels of E.F.Benson. She looks after not only Georgie, but also his complete household, including a cook. When Georgie's sisters Hermione & Ursula visit him with their pet terrier Tiptree, he is terrified. But not so Foljambe, who has the dreaded Tiptree eating out of her hand, metaphorically speaking. Even after her marriage to Chapman, Lucia's chauffeur, she continues serving Georgie during daytime.

The quaint Lucy Eyelesbarrow

This most unusual character in all fiction appears in Agatha Christie's "4.50 from Paddington." Here the detective Miss Marple suspects that a body is hidden in an old house in a large grounds occupied by the Rutherford family. As she cannot penetrate into the grounds, she recollects Lucy, who nursed her, when she had influenza.

This Lucy has a First in Mathematics from Oxford, but disdains an academic career, as it is poorly paid. She has observed that there is a great demand for efficient domestic help & the affluent are prepared to pay the earth for competent help. She decides to enter the market but only 2 weeks at a place as she wants to meet a variety of people.

On a request from Miss Marple, who subsidises her normal wages from the Rutherford family to make up her exorbitant wages, Lucy enters the family & promptly wins the hearts of everyone with her hard work & efficiency. In her spare time, she snoops around the ground & eventually discovers the body, leaving it to Miss Marple to stage a final showdown & unmask the culprit.

By the end of the novel, she may even marry one of the characters, about whose identity Miss Marple has no doubts but typically doesn't share it with the reader!