I Used to Live Here Once

                                              Brassy Twist

I caught most of the 2018 series of Masterchef Australia.  Its great.  It seems to combine the best of Masterchef UK and Masterchef USA.  The contestants really help and support each other rather than being brutally competitive and the judges are kind and supportive too (as in the UK version), but the challenges are more varied and interesting (as they are in the US version).

I could have called this blog: The Sandwich Fairy Asleep on Her Watch as when I was woken by Col's very early Alarm on Thursday morning (4:30 a.m.) I had a feeling that there was no sandwich lunch in the fridge.  I hastily got up and sorted it.  Its odd how having our Waitrose delivery come on Wednesday evening instead of Wednesday morning has thrown me.  I am a creature of routine (and solitude), as befits my Aspergery nature.

Col bought me the latest bio of Jean Rhys: I Used to Live Here Once by Miranda Seymour.   It is absorbing.  The writer David Plante is often criticised for writing a bio of her under the heading "Difficult Women" (the three women in question being Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer), but this bio seems to confirm the description of Jean at least.

I was glad to see the people of the Devon village where she spent her last years being treated with respect by her biographer.  It seems they were kind and helpful to Jean.   She clearly had a quality about her that attracted help, as there was always someone, or several someones - including three husbands -  to look after her.  

But the point that comes out clearly in this bio is that the one thing Jean never needed help with was her writing.  She knew exactly how to do that.

And what a writer she was.  Her words are alive on the page.  She, Shirley Jackson and Penelope Mortimer all have that quality, and its something that inspires me and that I try to emulate in my books (few though they are).   I don't come up to their standards, but it is good to have something to aim for.

The exquisite moth that heads this blog is a Brassy Twist, captured by Captain Moth-Butterfly on his phone on the Saturday expedition.

As Ecclesiastes 3:11 says of its Creator, Jehovah:  "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has even put eternity in their heart; yet mankind will never find out the work that the true God has made from start to finish."

It is all so lovely. And so interesting. So how lovely and how interesting will it be during the time the whole earth is being restored to paradise, and then living in the restored earthly paradise?  

I hope we are all there to find out.

If you want to learn more, please follow this link, or, hopefully, if I have done it right, click on it: 

https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/online-lessons/