BBQ

Tottered off to the BBQ last night.  It being my first chance to meet the Treasure Hunting crowd I felt I ought to go.   The food was excellent - no burgers!   And the garden was lovely, with a kind of walled (by greenery) vegetable garden hidden away at the end - very neat and productive.   The whole garden was charming and rambling with lots of interesting things.  One of which should appear when Captain B has time to do his photos.

He is a wounded Captain himself today - with a very bad knee.

I drove us back, as I don't drink more than a glass of wine per evening these days.

We have had a very quiet day today - a bit of shopping a bit of housework and a bit of study and that was it.  Plus I have had time to answer some interesting questions about the Bible from an internet acquaintance.  One thing he has asked me is, if Noah's flood was a real event, where did all the water come from?

So I have been able to show him what was taught to me - that Genesis tells us exactly where the water came from.  And the Christian Greek Scriptures confirm that account - at 2 Peter 3:5,6

Zimmering Along

The arthritis struck severely overnight. I wasn't able to get to the meeting this morning, but am hoping to be able hobble off to the Treasure Hunter BBQ this evening.

I did manage an hour on the doors yesterday morning with June and the group. We didn't find many in - but we did some return visits.

Its a miserable thing this arthritis.  And it is making me so tired. Everything, even getting out of bed, becomes such an effort. Maybe I will finally be able to get the emergency injection during my hospital visit this week.

I am wondering if its time for a poem...

I wrote this many years ago about my mother as she began her descent into the arthritis that finally killed her.  All her muscles wasted away, as her bones eroded. And of course, the heart is a muscle, so, in the end, it wasted away too.  We were in Saudi Arabia when it happened.  My sister rang me, very worried, to say that they were just rushing mummy to hospital.  Then we sat and waited for the final call, which came about half an hour later.

Some time before, we had found dry rot in our old terrace house, which perhaps accounts for the rather jumbled metaphor. So, not a brilliant poem but one that I did think about today.

I think about my parents most days, but not always of them old and sick of course.

IN THIS OLD HOUSE

 by me

In this old house all is still within

And nothing moves inside us

Except the thing that eats the bones

Can they isolate the virus?

She pulls the skirting board away

To show a heart stopping display of white

So we’ll call the specialists to her home

As the deadly stuff eats up her bones

But if Rentokil will not suffice

Her bones will lock in blocks of ice

The value of her house will tumble in a trice.

Rewell Wood

We went to Rewell Wood this afternoon.  It was overcast, but no rain.   Only one butterfly seen - The Captain's Log has the pictures.

In one of the clearings the ground was starred with horseshoe vetch so I asked Col to take a picture for my blog.

June rang to remind me that we are working together tomorrow.  Will it be raining?  If so, I have a big backlog of return visits to do.

A glimpse of winter, courtesy of Thomas Hardy

I was just re-reading "Tess of the D'Urbervilles".  What a cheerful fellow Thomas Hardy isn't.  But he recreates the rural life so vividly.  And here is a glimpse of Winter.

"When she (Tess of the D's) lit her lamp to get up in the morning, she found that the snow had blown through a chink in the casement, forming a white cone of the finest powder against the inside, and had also come down the chimney, so that it lay sole-deep upon the floor, on which her shoes left tracks when she moved about.  Without, the storm drove so fast as to create a snow-mist in the kitchen; but as yet it was too dark out-of-doors to see anything."

Well we have had a tiny bit of rain here - which thankfully has not poured down our (non-existent) chimney - but not nearly enough.  Our green is brown already. So we are hoping for rain this weekend, as promised.

What have I been doing apart from reading?   Not a lot, owing to my arthritic state.  Shopping, cooking... a little bit of housework.  My studying of course. I  got to the meeting last night.  The teaching is so wonderful - what sort of state would I be in now without it?

Ronald asked me if I could give him a lift back home, which I did.

I talked to Anne of The Cape and have followed up with an email.   I hope to be out on the field service with June tomorrow.

Back to the field

Out on the service with Audrey this morning.  We did her shopping first and then went to the Hall.  I was feeling SO tired but Mick gave us a lovely talk to energise us.  We were allocated a funny little close - one of those apparently designed to drive the local Posties into a nervous breakdown - with the numbers all over the place.  We hope we managed to get to all the doors.  Then we drove and drove in circles looking for what we thought was a little close, but was more like a private drive with only three houses in it.

Came back to find that Captain Butterfly had fled the coop.  He didn't get back till late afternoon, with a load of wonderful photos that should make it to his blog tomorrow.

I studied and made mushroom soup and rhubarb crumble with custard to welcome the Wanderer home.  Am hoping for a day off tomorrow, apart from housework.  And perhaps a follow up by email on a Creation brochure.

Bea gone

We drove Bea to the station this morning - and went to Tesco's for a shop. The house feels quite empty without her.  Col took us both to Kitthurst Hill yesterday, but we were allowed to stay in the car and read once we had visited the butterfly meadow.  Bea read Barbara Pym and was laughing away in the back of the car.  I was doing my studying - we are in the middle of a close examination of Acts, to see what we can learn from those early Christians - from their faith and their courage and their constancy in the preaching work.

I was wondering once again if maybe we will all find our way to the spot on Kitthurst Hill where the carpark was a million years from now.  Will it all have returned to forest?  Or what will it be like?  Will we remember these visits there now - or even want to?

Well, i just hope that the three of us are there, in the restored earthly Paradise, to find out.

Billing and Cooing

Very upsetting goings on on our balcony.  A couple of pigeons have taken to courting in the nest like rim of our downpipe.  We kept hearing this billing and cooing, the murmuring of sweet nothings, the rustlings of boxes of chocolates being unwrapped, knees being knelt on, and rings being exchanged.

We looked out, and there they were, cuddled up on our downpipe, cooing and bobbing at each other.   We meanly chased them off.  

But both for their sakes and for ours.  While we don't want pigeons nesting on our balcony, we also know what they apparently don't, that the next rain will wash the nest out.

Unless of course they know something we don't and there ain't going to be no rain!

Then they started to turn up with bits of building material so we had to blockade the pipe.

It makes me feel such a bully.  They look so downcast.   He obviously thought he was making this beautiful home for her and now we have spoilt it all.  It makes me worry that there aren't enough nesting sites around here.

What a mess we, the human race, are in.  We just can't manage this beautiful and complex planet.

Which is why we are to pray for God's Kingdom to come.

All pigeons will have perfect nesting sites then, and nothing and nobody will be interrupting their happy courtship.

The House of Three Milks Revisited

Once again we are The House of Three Milks.   Goats Milk for me; Soya Milk for Bea; and (I quote) "Proper" Milk for Captain Sensible.

The Captain abandoned us yesterday and went to Dorset in search of the butterfly herds, so we took ourselves off to town and had coffee and watched the world go by and visited all the charity shops.

The bright lights, the big city.

The weather is amazing - sunshine every day, with a sparkling English Channel.   I got to the Meeting at the Hall last night, and I must must must sign myself into the Ministry School again.  I learnt so much from it already.

The travels of the wooden boulder

We - Bea, Col and I - watched a... what would you call it?  a piece of installation art at the Pallant Gallery today.  It was by David Nash and called "Wooden Boulder 1978-2003".

He filmed the travels of a piece of tree trunk from when it was cut down (in 1978) to when it disappeared out to sea (in 2003).   The boulder was travelling through a river and estuary in a wild and beautiful part of Wales, and it was magical to watch.

If you get a chance to see it, don't fail to do so.

I wonder where it is now.  Perhaps Maurice the Mussel is sailing it somewhere, as I haven't seen him for a while.

The other wonderful thing in the gallery today was the children's art in The Studio.   We were pulled in by a wonderful Rose window they had created and were held by the acrylic paintings.  They were made to look like stained glass, with the most vivid, brilliant colours.   They were beautifully composed.  My favourite was the hand with blue nail polish.

Had it been for sale, I would have been unable to resist buying it, even though we don't have in inch of wall space left.

To Bea or not to Bea

Bea arrived yesterday afternoon.  We picked her up from the station on our way back from Tesco’s.  We arrived about a second after her train did.

Captain Butterfly had been out butterflying.  What else?

He has some amazing pictures of courting butterflies, it being Spring.  But I am a little worried that one of these spring nights, a giant butterfly with camera and a blog of its own will turn up in our bedroom.  Hopefully, if there is such a creature, it will be attracted to younger, more sprightly human beings.

“Speak for yourself”, says the thought bubble above the Captain’s head.

Maggie and I went out and finished both our magazine routes for May, so that gave us a sense of accomplishment.  We had some good conversations with various people.

The Return of the Missing Blog Post!

The missing blog post has come back on the tide from wherever in the Internet Sea it had wandered to, so Roger's presents now have two blogspots.

However, they are worth it.

Very sunny day here.  Jean and I did over an hour on the door to door preaching work this morning.  Jean placed four of our new Creation brochures, making the case for the Genesis account of our origins.  She placed both of hers and both of mine - so we must get some more at the Hall tomorrow.

A positive start to the day, but unfortunately I am in such a feeble state that I could hardly walk when I got back and have spent a lot of time on the sofa moaning and groaning.   The wonderful Captain Butterfly had a rare day at home and I got back to find that all the floors had been done.

Inspired by this bout of Spring cleaning I tackled the fridge.

I bought some lovely fresh eggs from one of our householders today so it was an omelette lunch.

The news gets more and more frightening.   It does seem, as we go door to door, that people are wondering about it and wondering why.

The Inspired Scriptures tell us - and give a wonderful reassurance too.

Present 2

My blog for yesterday with the picture of Roger's presents has disappeared in the housekeeping that happened  at Blog HQ today.   How?  Why?  Where?

Anyway, I must now recreate it.  Roger has been and gone and left me a beautiful beautiful African carving, a picture of which will appear courtesy of Captain Butterfly.  I also asked him for a photograph of a tile that Roger gave me when we visited them on The Cape.

It is the essence of Cape on a tile - including two wonderful little guinea fowl.

Roger also left us a fridge full of bread and butter pudding.

I got to the meeting yesterday where I was able to give Audrey her change, make arrangements to work with Jean tomorrow, further my search for a window cleaner for Jackie, and above all to be taught.  It feels as if I have been away for a long time, though its only a couple of Thursdays I have missed.

I have typed up Rosemary's convention notes - and that was wonderful teaching too.   But I did next to nothing today beyond a bit of studying - talked to Jacks - finished the washing and ironing all ready for our visitor next week - and watched some daytime TV.

Presents

Roger left this morning. He has left us a fridge full of his excellent bread and butter pudding.   And he bought me a lovely lovely African carving - see photo (thank you Captain Butterfly).  When we visited him on The Cape some years ago he also bought me the tile you see in the second photo.  Its the essence of The Cape on a tile - and, were money no object, I would have my bathroom done out in harmony with it - including a couple of plastic guinea fowl for the bath.

Modern Life - part 1

The telly is promising me that I can win a nice sum of money (or is it a holiday abroad?) if I can phone in the answer to the following question:

Which country has the Great Barrier Reef off its coast?

Is it:

(a)  The Republic of Landlockedia

(b)  Never Never Land

(c)  Australia

If only I could work it out...

Roger arrived this morning and took us out for a lovely pub lunch.  He then made us a bread and butter pudding for dessert, while Captain B made us all some coffee.  All I have had to do is to provide us a cold tea this evening.   He leaves for Gatwick in the morning.

Roger has bought me another wonderful present which I am going to ask Captain B to photograph so I can put it on my blog tomorrow.  I may have to make it fly and flutter round the room a bit to get him to do it, but I hope it will appear, it is so lovely.  Its a little sculpture by a Zimbabwean artist at present working on The Cape.

The three sisters (minus two)

Nute and Pen left early yesterday morning after a fun weekend - or as fun as detoxing can be.   Jacks came round for a glass of wine on the Sunday night and she, the Captain and I went to see Georgie Fame yesterday evening.  He looks older and frailer than the last time we saw him - but so do we.  And it was a great concert.  He filled the concert hall again - we couldn't see a spare seat in the house.

Audrey and I went out on the doors this morning via a trip to the doctors (me) and a trip to the bank (her).  We were working with Maggie and partner but we couldn't find the second road we were to do.  Its in a housing estate so new it isn't on my local map yet.   So we went off and did a couple of my remaining magazine route calls for May.  We found both of my recipients at home and had a nice chat with each.

Have been on sofa resting my knees ever since...  I no longer dare hobble past the local Veterinary Clinic in case one of the doctors rushes out with a syringe of lethobarb to put me out of my misery.

The Roger arrives tomorrow!  A complete surprise - but a very nice one.  So we will catch up on the news from the beautiful Cape.

The Cauldron simmers

De-toxing is hard work.  Most of yesterday was taken  up with making the "healing juice" and the oat/nut/seed/apple breakfasts.  It seems to take all morning to eat the breakfast - then you have to start on lunch.
Last day today. Hurray.  Breakfast has been got down (and will take all day to digest). Its an omelette and salad lunch, followed by a mid afternoon snack of dried figs (yummy...) and then we are finished.

We can have a cup of tea!

Trouble with the Cauldron

It was a marathon effort to get the Juicer to work, involving all three sisters and Captain Butterfly himself.  In the end, after hours of effort and covering the kitchen in beetroot juice, we each got a glass of our healing juice.   It tasted quite nice.   Nute managed to bring us some real organic beetroot, which did help.

It was another strenuous effort to get the detox breakfast down this morning - hours of chewing.   We finish the detox Sunday afternoon and plan to treat ourselves to a Thai veggie curry in the evening to celebrate.

But only IF we stick with it.

Paul of Arabia

We lunched at Warnham and wandered round the reserve, watching butterflies and dragon and damsel flies, and a wonderful set of baby coots.  They were five tiny little things with two busy parents feeding them bread that someone had thrown onto the pond.   I was able to supply a Paul comment when we were watching a grebe dive in the lake outside one of the Hides.   "If it gets mad at us for spying on it and it attacks, can we accuse it of grebious bodily harm?"

I wonder why I ever swallowed down all the Evolution/Blind Watchmaker stuff that "the world" fed to me, when I see the exquisite artistry and engineering of a dragonfly - and of everything else.

There was a sea of bulrushes at the landbridge.

Then on to a marathon shop for the DeTox which is to start tomorrow evening.   

A thought for today

"When your enemy falls, do not rejoice; and when he is caused to stumble, may your heart not be joyful." - Proverbs 24:17

"He that is joyful at another's disaster will not be free of punishment." - Proverbs 17:5b

Every one of us has a choice as to whether we will obey our Creator who is the very Source of wisdom - or not.   Every command he gives us is for our benefit.

The Lemongrass provided us with some lovely green Thai curries last night - and Mr.Cadbury provided the dessert - choc ices.   Jacks is going to come over Sunday night and have a drink with the three sisters.  We will have finished our 3 day detox by then and so she will be spared having to face a cup of herbal tea.

Since the sisters visit was proposed, Col has been quoting the beginning of Macbeth rather a lot, but I have assured him that Eye of Newt is not allowed on our detox regime.

Audrey and I managed to zimmer our way around quite a bit of my magazine route today.  

Single girl days

Just back from the New Forest.  We drove over to visit Bob and Helen - well, specifically Helen, as Bob  was at work. We hope they will be coming over to us soon.  We have known each other since before we were all married.  I shared a flat with Helen in my faraway single girl days.

And when we were all young marrieds - living in the Richmond/Kew area - we used to meet up regularly to play Cluedo.   They bought our house when we left London for the North and they lived there for many years.

We talked a lot about our health problems - just as I always remember the grown-ups doing when I was a child.

Like us, they are loving living by the sea.   The picture that should appear on this blog in time is of the front garden of their lovely retirement bungalow.

Jacks is coming round tonight for a Thai takeaway and a selection of cheeses from the farm shop.  And tomorrow I hope to be out on the doors with Audrey.