The Scented Balcony

I was out on our balcony on Tuesday morning doing my studying - our Bible reading for the week in the Book of Numbers.  The air was full of the scent of Nemesia - and the Channel was so lovely, layers of colour, and the sky was full of what Philip Larkin called "high-builded clouds" - white and fluffy in a blue blue sky.

I thanked Jehovah for making it so beautiful for us - and hope one day to be able to thank him from a perfect heart.   

I was wondering too if "The Scented Balcony" would be a good book title.  Or not.  It sounds like it would be a sensitive kind of novel, with lots of emoting and not much done, i.e. rather boring.  On the other hand I do remember a Jonathan Creek episode called "The Scented Room" which involved the disappearance of a valuable painting from a locked and guarded room.

But as its not likely we would be keeping a valuable painting - if indeed we had one - on a balcony, I don't think that would work either.

We had a small walk to the river and back in the afternoon - all my poor crumbling back will take.  It was sunnyish with a cold wind blowing and quite a lot of people out.  The little beach shops are beginning to re-open but the weather was against them.  Things are, in theory, beginning to return to normal, with a certain worry about what they call the "Indian" variant of Covid hanging over us.  It is apparently doing devastating damage on the sub-continent.

I got some more territory on Saturday and hope to begin it today at the Zoom field service meeting.   I have been trying to recover from a week on my new med - a strong psychiatric sort of drug (prescribed I believe for depression, but in this case apparently to try "to fool" my brain into stopping giving me eczema).   I am not depressed in the clinical sense, though obviously my health problems get me down at times.  I am in the death zone - have had my "three score years and ten", so I know to be grateful I am still here.

And the medicine did fool my brain into switching off the eczema!  But, alas, it also seemed to switch off the mechanism which allowed me to sleep.  And it filled my mind with strange strange thoughts.  So after a week I have had to stop taking it...  

Not sure what do do.  The doctors assure me it is prescribed at the lowest dose, so I can't reduce it.  I seem to have reached that stage where my meds begin to clash impossibly with each other.

I am also wondering what it must be like to be on a normal dose of it...

In the meantime, I hope to be able to get back to my letters, telling everyone who will listen about the Kingdom of God.  It alone can solve our problems - restoring obedient humankind to perfection: physical, mental, moral - and restoring the earth to the paradise it was always meant to be.  And then, and only then, our real lives can begin.