Today our John Lewis Hessian shopping bag kept scuffing the pavement.
So either
The handles are too long
Or
My arms are too long
Or
My legs are too short
Or
My posture has slumped
Or
The pavements undulate without warning
Or
I need a shopping bag with length adjustable handles.
Wasn't going to complain. But
28 December to 30 December blocked main drain. Details censored in consideration of those with delicate imaginations.
30 December no water – main supply fractured and three postcode areas affected. Bought 30 litres of water to divide amongst the neighbours – water back on before it could be distributed.
4 January took our 17 year old cat to the vet – had to come home without him, and he is now, it warms my heart to believe, purring in eternity.
Sunday January 9, at 2.13 pm ( I noted the time) the cold water supply burst in the cavity between the garage and the kitchen.
Three hours later, fingers numb and feeling as big as cucumbers, arm scraped after lying on the road on the ice, trying to locate the cold water supply turn-off valve while my cheek was pressed into the slushy tarmac, I managed to attach a hose to the gushing pipe and persuade the water to run harmlessly into the main drain, which was now mercifully unblocked.
Monday Jan 10, still unable to locate the turn-off valve in the house, accompanied by a plumber whose patience was biblical in its perdurance, and after us trying again to get the street valve to turn-off while avoiding multiple hernia injuries, we finally attached two pressure seals to the ends of the fractured joints, the only down side being the icy plentiful spray that ( I use the word for once in its more accurate and untheological sense) inerrantly found that part of our necks and the inside of the sleeves at the wrists, so that channels of icy water flowed up to the oxter and encountered channels of icy water flowing down the front of our shirts.
There are valuable and profound and meaningful and transformative spiritual lessons to be learned from all this, but I can't be bothered.
Those familiar with the Scots language will know what I mean when I say I am scunnered. Those unfamiliar with the word – ask me on a better day. 🙂
Grey morning mizzle,
forecast more of the same.
Leisurely drive to Largs on a mission
that proved fruitless.
Until….
Refuge in Nardini's
for a humanising pot of tea,
And a doughnut…..
A freshly made,
just tossed in lemon infused sugar,
3 inch radius and one inch deep,
crunchy crusted doughnut.
Our original mission forgotten.
For Mario the doughnut maker
mission accomplished….
two customers still smiling,
glowing all the way home.
OK. After several requests and not a few demands – here's the picture – Sheila and I routinely out for a night….! Unfortunately the picture doesn't show the whole me – which included multicoloured trousers, pink gloves, luminous striped socks and lurid lime green plastic shoes. That one might yet be emailed to me, in which case, for a small fee…….
Must be a new lease of life. Or we've suddenly become socially in demand. Whatever, we are just back from another party in Aberdeen. Not fancy dress this time – a significant birthday of a good friend. But we are back in Aberdeen later this week for a 90th birthday party.
Three parties in 12 days. And each of them special because the person whose life is being celebrated is special and integral not only to our lives but to that sense of who we are, that derives from the giftedness of those relationships that define, enrich and impinge on our lives in many welcome ways. I believe deeply that we are persons in relation, and that individuality only matters when it is encompassed within the shared lives of those who move in and out and within our lives. Who these people are, how we met them, what led to the formation of such enduring connections of love, affection and friendship is part of the mystery of human relatedness, but also part of the graced gift that each person is who troubles to think any one of us worth getting to know.
So not much time for reading you'd think. True enough, but wee corners of time still found here and there. I've just finished Susan Hill's book about a year's reading of only the books already in her home. Along the way she dishes out wisdom and advice, opinion and prejudice, gossip and mini-memoirs – the book is a delight. And there are still a couple of quotes worth inserting here. The last one did get a couple of gentle correctives from Rick and Jason – you can see my comment response on Jason's blog here. Anyway, here's Ms Hill saying what I've long suspected – that the books we read deeply become part of who we are:
"Books help to form us. If you cut me open, will you find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me?….What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA."
Susan Hill, Howard's End is on the Landing (London: Profile Books, 2009), 201-2.
Feel the need of a poem. Too much theological prose dessicates the imagination, and makes the mental processes sluggish.
(Interesting how we learn words – 'dessicated' I learned as a wee boy who loved coconut and raided the packets bought for baking)
Just watched the robin clearing out the local sparrow scruff from the back garden. Reminds me of Fanthorpe's poem, "The Robin".
It's reference to Christmas is allowed in October – Dobbies have their Christmas cards out. So that's all right then.
The Robin
I am the proper
Bird for this
season –
Not blessed St
Born to be eaten.
I’m the man’s
inedible
Permanent bird.
I dine in his
garden,
My spoon is his
spade.
I’m the true token
Of Christ the Child–King:
I nest in man’s
stable,
I eat at man’s
table,
Through all the
dark winters
I sing
On the train going into Glasgow to meet Sheila around 4 o'clock Thursday.
Stop at Corkerhill and it seems the entire student cohort of Cardonald College want to get on this train.
Three loud talking and laughing female teenagers threw themselves into the seats opposite and beside me.
The one on my side dunted me as she landed, turned and smiled which I think was an apology.
In front of me on the table a glossy Now Magazine, and the girls across from me picked it up and looked at me. No I said, it isn't mine! One smiles, laughs at her pals, and then they flick through it using the various pictured celebs for slagging off target practice.
As we draw into Glasgow Central another train drew alongside and the driver with a permafix unsmile was within four feet of our window. All three girls waved and smiled and he looked across – but his mouth didn't flinch one millimetre towards that place where life might look half tolerable for him.
Which sent all three of them into near hysteria mixed with incredulity at their failure to coax him back to the world where it isn't all so grim.
Embarrassed by this virtuoso facial performance of negative emotional equity I muttered to the three of them, 'Apologies on behalf of my generation'. The one holding the magazine looked at me and said one word 'Awthatsawrightyourcool'
By the time I met Sheila at Queen Street I'd stopped floating, buoyed up by such proximity to fun, energy and young possibilities of life, grinning in defiant goodwill at those daft enough to make a career out of joylessness.
Oh, and while we're on the daft stuff. While waiting for Sheila's train to arrive, I noticed a woman eating chips while texting a friend, and managing both with considerable dexterity. Presumably, despite the fact that the phone keypad must have been getting a bit slippery……multi-tasking develops in ever stranger combinations, huh?
OK. This photo has come by a convoluted route, latterly via Maggi and Ben, and it's just too good to not post on every blog hosted by admirers of the finest Archbishop for yonks. Those who criticise Rowan Williams for being too intelligent to be an Archbishop, for being out of touch and having no idea about the life of ordinary folk, could do with some of the unself-conscious playfulness on display here. "Except you become as a little child…" is an appropriate admonition that comes to mind. I wonder how some of the more rasping journalists would have coped with the serious reality of children's play in a way that both enjoys and affirms the life of the child.
And then to another kind of foolishness altogether. You know how we are all to become energy conscious, climate change aware, careful where we put our big stomping carbon footprints? So yesterday driving down near Braehead and we observe the Council workers cutting the roadside grass with muckle big flymos, wearing the regulation fluorescent orange overalls. It was drizzly wet and windy, and the massacred grass lay in green clumps and apparently needed tidying up. So behind the flymo operator came another toiler in the rain – not with a grass rake to gather it into compostable organic stuff. Naw, naw. Nothing so environmentally responsible. he was sporting one of the big petrol fuelled blowers with which he was blowing the slaughtered grass into the adjoining fields, and doing so against the prevailing stiff breeze! Apart from the obvious non composting policy, here we have a machine that cuts but doesn't collect the grass (petrol fuelled), and one which blows grass against the wind, using petrol to disperse what the wind would disperse in half an hour.
The aforementioned drizzle, pushed into our faces by a stiff breeze, tried its best to waste our walk around the Mugdock reservoir. Nae chance! We knew that when we got back home some of Jim's magnifique home made French onion soup, along with a smoked applewood cheese toastie would restore that inner sense of wellbeing that only comes to those who do the walk and wallow in self-righteousness over a large bowl of immodestly described consummate cuisine………
Recent sighting of a Baptist monk, pictured while in full conversational flow, beside a secluded loch in the Central Highlands in early summer. Note that the habit, or hoodie, hides the monk's tonsure – for those who don't know, that's the remaining halo of hair once the crowning glory has departed. The sideways glance and talkative grin are characteristic of this particular species of Baptist Hoodie. This posting keeps the promise I made to post photos demonstrating that on rare occasions I can appear in public without a tie!
In Garden Centre Tearoom.
Ask for a latte.
Then, hoping for a skinny latte I ask if they can do one with semi-skimmed milk.
Answer from smiling but bemused sales executive : "We've only got green milk or blue milk."
Now you need to be quick, domesticated and sure of your retail facts but I got it right away and first time.
"Green", I said.
Not the blue – which is full cream.
Not the red which they didn't have – which is skimmed.
But the green – semi skimmed.
Sales executive and customer happy.
Green or blue milk. Sectarianism. Sneaks in everywhere so it does!