The Speed of Light

Col picked me up from the Kingdom Hall on Thursday night and rushed me off home at the speed of light - well, at the speed of an elderly lightbeam zimmering slowly through the universe.  Another bad night on Friday/Saturday.  That is par for the course nowadays and seems unlikely to change, well not this side of Armageddon anyway.

I am now so sleep deprived that I am wondering about trying that anti-depressant again...  it's my age really I guess. I am now nearer eighty than I am seventy.  And that is old.  Yet how quickly it has gone.

I have decided to cheer myself up by choosing a couple of flower pictures to head the blog. The first is one Col took in NZ - so many years ago - of a fuschia growing wild.  Fuschia was one of my mother's favourite flowers.  It grew all over Cornwall where she spent her childhood summers.  And the second is Thrift, which I associate with my own early childhood summers in Cornwall.

That has reminded me of the flower called Honesty, which I loved to have in our garden, when we had a garden. We just have a sea facing balcony now and a blaze of geraniums.  Thrift also thrives there of course.  My mum-in-law Eileen liked Honesty too - and Iceplant - both of which she had in her London garden.

So many layers of memories - so how will it be to have hundreds and hundreds of years of memories behind me - and all of them so happy?   

Monday was a double Zoom session, one with my congregation sisters and one with my siblings. All seems well with all of us, thank God. I now have requests for more Not Home letters, I need to continue to send invites to the block of flats I was given, and start my study for the week - plus think about how to do my part in the School next week. So, thanks to Jehovah, I have a lot of positive things to take my mind off my medical miseries.

Fantastic Books Publishing

Us Fantastic authors, or six of us anyway, met up via Zoom on Monday night for a chat about how to market our books - especially by Youtube type videos.  Our publisher is Fantastic Books Publishing by the way, just in case you thought I was calling myself fantastic!  

I can write, but for sure I am not Dickens.

Author James Vigor gave us a great lesson in doing this - though I will need a lot of help from my Resident Tech Expert. And I still can't afford Kate Moss to be me in the video. Its a Catch 22 really, to afford her I need to have the blockbusting bestseller, but to have the blockbusting bestseller I need her to be me in my video.

https://www.fantasticbooksstore.com/

Oh well.  I am just so grateful to be published. I put a lot of work into those books, into making them page turners and I have a few appreciative readers who would happily buy the next one if I can ever get it written.

But I suspect I no longer have the energy.  And it does take energy to keep returning to the world of the book and moving it along.   If only I could get some sleep. Having said that, I do get some, but the pain keeps waking me.  A friend very kindly offered to bring me round some sleep tea, but I had to point out that it wasn't sleep that was the problem as such, it was the pain that keeps waking me.

I got to the Kingdom Hall in person on Thursday night - rather than in pixel form - so I hope I may be back on a regular basis now.  It all depends how the pain goes I guess.

Or whether it goes!

I have been enjoying watching both The Great British Menu, and The Apprentice.  There was an Apprentice first yesterday when Lord Sugar declared both teams "losers" and sacked one candidate from each team.

That could often have been said and done before, but this is the first time he has actually done it - over a Hot Sauce challenge too, which did not  seem like one of the more difficult ones.

Climbing Everest by Cake

The Watchtower study on Sunday was about how husbands can honour their wives. And one way is by being appreciative.  

"Praise your wife for the good things she does. (Proverbs 31:28,29: Her children rise up and declare her happy; Her husband rises up and praises her. There are many capable women, But you—you surpass them all.")"

And I am happy to report that Captain Butterfly scores very high on the Being Appreciative scale - while, being a truthful chap, not claiming that I surpass them all.

Though he might say that my apple crumble does.  And so I had better be humble and admit that it is based on a Jamie Oliver rhubarb crumble recipe - and works well with either fruit.

It means a lot to be appreciated.  For example, on Saturday, finding I had just used the last piece of cake from the freezer, I managed to make a fruit cake.  I had enough of the basic ingredients in to cook something approximate to the Boil and Bake fruitcake in my Crank's recipe book.  I am in such a sad state that it felt like climbing Everest - without Sherpa support and oxygen. 

I had to keep pausing, and resting. But in the end it was done. And there is a natural pause with this cake anyway. You have to simmer half the ingredients in butter and orange juice, then let it cool down before adding the dry.  So I could go and lie on the bed during the waiting stage.

To illustrate my mountain climbing metaphor, I managed to find a picture of a mountain in Col's photo gallery. Its not Everest - as you have probably noticed.  It's in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia.

Anyway, the point of this sizzling anecdote is that the cake turned out nicely - perhaps even better than usual! - and Col was very grateful. He really appreciated the effort, which made the effort well worthwhile.

I know you can buy excellent cake, but there is something about homemade. And anyway, they are what Himself likes.  My cakes are sturdy, not in the least fancy. But as a sister once said, in the days when we had a meal after our main meeting on a sort of potluck basis: "Your cakes don't look much, but they do taste nice".

Ideally of course they should look a million dollars AND taste nice. But, if I can only have one...

And anyway, they have to be sturdy to stand up to the rigours of The Field (it used to be "the rigours of the dive boat, or the desert" in what are now the olden days).

How quickly the years rush us along to that edge... but how wonderful to know that there can be an awakening from the dreamless sleep of death and the hope of seeing this lovely world again.  It is a hope we want to share with everyone.

Which is why we are inviting all we can to the Memorial of Jesus' death on the 12th April.  It is through his perfect life, given as a ransom for the life Adam so tragically threw away, that we have this hope.

Andy Fairweather Lowe and the Low Riders at the Ropetackle

Wednesday was a busy day - for me, nowadays.  Neither the Captain nor I had a good nights's sleep - him constant coughing - me, my pains - so he slept in (very unusual). The pain got me up early, which was good as I had to get ready for the study.  My sister comes at 9:45. I was OK timewise, but was wondering how I was going to get myself dressed without my resident (unpaid) Carer in attendance. I did not want to wake the poor guy, but he did wake up in time, and got me all ready to go and brisked me out the door on the very second of 9:45.

We spent two hours with our student and got back before lunch to find everything set out ready - I just had to heat up the soup and the apple crumble. 

It was an afternoon Zoom with another sister as we got on with our field service together - and hopefully encouraged each other.

Supper was pizza - easy peasy - and then a session watching The Bay - talk about gloomy - but true to life, alas, as the fruitage of the rebellion in Eden becomes more and more evident.

Given that I seem to be making so many crumbles, I wondered what would happen if I put the word  "crumble" into Col's online photo gallery. So I did - and this came up - an Orange Crumble Sponge that Col took in the Maldives!

Today I am making a fruit cake - as I am down to my last piece of homemade cake, which is now reposing in the Captain's lunch box along with his sandwiches. And he needs another lunch for tomorrow.

I think I experienced another of the "lasts" of old age too - the last outing - on Friday night. We went to see Andy Fairweather Low at the Ropetackle.  It was almost beyond me to cope, I was in such a lot of pain.  But we did it.

He and his band are very good - seasoned musicians - and he still has a great voice - he is our age. But what he does not do is the 60s/70s nostalgia tour that I (at least) was expecting.

He packed the venue - not a single empty seat, well apart from the one next to the Captain, but that is probably because he spent the first hour (before the concert started) coughing.  He did test himself for Covid  before going out in public by the way - and the test was negative.

So a good evening out, but perhaps such things are no longer for me.  Not this side of Armageddon anyway. And afterwards, who knows?  Will we sit listening to music, or will be all be able to get up and dance to it then.

I just hope that the Captain and I will be there to find out.

The Memorial Campaign starts today.  We will be issuing invitations from door to door - letterbox to letterbox - for the Memorial of Jesus' death which will be after sunset on the 12th April  It is through Jesus' sacrificial death that we, the damaged, dying children of disobedient Adam - can have back the life, the perfection, the joy, the paradise that our first parents so tragically lost.

THREADS

This weekend I discovered the Barry Hines movie THREADS.  I found it compelling.  It is set in my hometown, Sheffield, back in the eighties - almost a vanished era for the young I guess.  And it features the Town Hall extension that my father, an architect designed! We see the building functioning as ordinary life goes on, while the political situation as reported on The News is worsening. We see the local civil servants who will be in control if a nuclear war breaks out gather there.

And then we see it blown up when Sheffield is nuked.

It made me feel sad in many different ways.  Threads shows us the people of Sheffield going about their business as the political situation darkens and puts an end to all their hopes and plans - people I knew and worked with - people like me.

And, ironically, the extension - a lovely building - was effectively nuked by the politics of the time. It was planned and designed when local government was expanding.  The Town Hall even financed a Peace Movement then that was going to keep Sheffield safe from being nuked by making it into a Nuclear Free Zone (?).  And there was a Left Wing Bookshop, I remember, which I think it also financed.  It re-booted itself as The Independent Bookshop before it disappeared as mysteriously as the Marie Celeste.  It was closed one day - pretty much with half drunk cups of tea still on the counter.  Which I presume marked the moment that the Council could no longer fund it.

As I remember it, the Peace Movement itself was so riven with division that if one factor could have nuked the other it probably would.  Anyway, politics was changing, local government was being shrunk, not expanded.  And by the time the Town Hall extension was built, it was no longer needed.

So, in time it was emptied and demolished, along with daddy's lovely Registry Office, where Penny and George were married.  It was round, and known locally as "The Wedding Cake".  The Winter Gardens that replaced it are nice, and well-used. But unfortunately the buildings that replaced it were the standard tall glass and steel boxes.

Whereas the lost extension had a pleasant roundness about it - a softness. Someone once described it as "the box which the Wedding Cake came in".  Not just a featureless box in other words.

Anyway my father is in the centre of the picture above, with all the young architects of the 1950's making a valiant effort to build a brave new world from the bombsites and rubble of World War 2.  I recognise Don, and John, and Aziz - all iconic names from my childhood.

It was a sincere effort, after the horrors of two world wars, but of course they were up against the forces of "the world", which are set on destruction.

And as the Inspired Scriptures so rightly warn: "It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step."  We cannot put right what has gone so wrong no matter how much we long to.

But when God's Kingdom is ruling over the earth, will those sincere and enthusiastic young architects in the photo be woken from the dreamless sleep of death, and under the loving and flawless direction of the heavenly government, will they be able to have a part in building the paradise they so much wanted to build back then?

I hope so. Very much.  Think of how lovely some of our older cities are - cities like Rome and Venice for example - built at a time when the human family was closer to its perfect start than it is now.

How much lovelier will the cities in the paradise earth be?

OOTLIN by Jenni Fagan

I must order a copy of OOTLIN by Jenni Fagan. Having read her article about it in The Guardian, I think it will be compelling. A must read. 

Jenni Fagan says:

On the day the Freedom of Information Act came in, I picked up the phone at 9am. It took me 24 years to get my social work files. I picked up a vast heavy load of them. Hundreds, thousands of pages, most redacted in black lest they validate something that would allow me to sue them. I had lived in so many placements, had multiple name changes, foster families, adoptions, children’s homes and hostels. I had been through more as a child raised by the state than I ever thought possible to get my head around.

I had never got to have my say, legally, or otherwise.

I suffered from lifelong brainwashing telling me I was the issue. I’ve never met an abuser who owned what they did, or a system that wanted to be accountable.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/12/jenni-fagan-ootlin-a-memoir-childhood-in-care


I wondered what photograph to choose to head a blog with such a sad subject... maybe I should look for a reassuring paradise earth pic to remind me and any readers I may have (and I welcome every one of you) that all this sadness is only temporary, and  that our Creator has promised us a time on the earth when "the former things will not be brought to mind, neither will they come up into the heart". So I have found a photo of a Flowering Dogwood in the lovely Nyman's Gardens, which Col took earlier in our retirement.

Col is having a bit of an odd week.  Rachel Riley is missing from Countdown.  She is not on for three weeks apparently!   A nice young maths teacher is doing her job. He is so much nicer than any maths teacher I have ever had, with the honourable exception of Mr. Capps and Mr. Hughes.  Mr. Hughes was too kind to be scathing about my lack of maths skill, and while Mr. Capps was brilliantly sarcastic about the lack, he did it in a way that made me laugh as well as the rest of the class.

However, the substitute teacher is not Rachel, so Col is pining.  On the doubleplusgood side, he is enjoying the athletics which are on this weekend.  And there are various rugby and football matches on the telly as well. He can tell one match from another - a special skill that lads seem to have.

He is having to do a lot of work looking after me at the moment.  I am managing some sleep, for which I thank God, but I wake up in such pain that I can hardly use my hands and arms.  It does get better once I can get my meds down with breakfast, made, as always by Captain B.  He was at home on Saturday - not metal detecting - amazing.  He was out Sunday though and so needed his usual Sunday sandwich lunch. I had a dream Friday night in which he was leaving, very early, with no lunch as I had forgotten to make it.  

I had a rare outing last night. We went to Worthing to see Gordon Buchanan on his Lions and Tigers and Bears tour.  It was well worth it - very entertaining, very fast moving, very funny, and some great photos.  It was quite painful and difficult too, but only because of the current status of my arthritis.

It resulted in me dreaming this morning that Captain B came into the bedroom to tell me he was leaving for The Field, and he had a cat in a cat carrier in his hand.  I was just trying to work out what was wrong with that - the vet would not be open that early? - and hadn't got round to the fact that we hadn't got a cat before the real Captain arrived to tell me that breakfast was ready.

My dreams are very odd at the moment, but after so many almost sleepless nights I guess my brain has a lot of catching up to do.

.

Four Ducks

 

Four Ducks on a Pond,

by William Allingham

Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond,
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
What a little thing
To remember for years-
To remember with tears! 

I know I have posted this poem before but we had some spring-like days and it is my favourite spring poem. It is such a paradise earth poem. I do love Spring and Autumn, but my rather unsociable introvert personality prefers Winter to Summer.

Although having said that, my childhood summers were a wonderful oasis from the horrors of school. The summer holidays seem to go on forever back then. And we always seemed to be outdoors. Even though we lived on the edge of the inner city, there were lots of places to play - the parks, the bomb sites, and of course the moors - only a bus ride away.

And for some reason this poem makes me think of washing blowing on the line. All the mothers hung out their washing to dry back then, which was ecologically very sound. And I imagine us all doing that in the paradise earth - billowing washing lines blowing in the Spring breeze, white clouds scudding across, ducks on the pond!

And the ducks will be happy too. They will be safe. We won't be eating them, and no predators will be after their darling little fluffy chicks. I am trying not to remember an awful "nature, red in tooth and claw" moment at the Arundel Wetland Trust when a giant seagull...

I will leave it there. And look forward to a time on earth when such moments are no more.

We got to our Bible student on Wednesday morning and had a lovely session with her. We are talking about the creation - how we learn from it, and copy it. For example, the shape of the Japanese bullet train was inspired by the shape of the Kingfisher.

Now we often, and rightly, praise the inventors of all these marvelous things. And much credit to them. I am sure I could look at a Kingfisher for eons and never come up with a toy train, let alone a bullet train. And if it was up to me, we would still be trying to reach the moon by horse and cart. But do we ever stop and thank the Grand Creator, Jehovah?

The more we learn about the wonders of creation, the more we should. This world, this universe we float in, is a miracle, and it will bring us more joy and happiness than we can now imagine. And that is what our loving Creator, Jehovah, wants for every one of us. And this is what we so much want our Bible student to know.