The Rented World

Col continues to improve every day, despite the painful foot.  It's another medical week - Worthing hospital for him, Specsavers for moi. 

Bea has given me something positive to think about by suggesting a short story, set on a canal boat.  She wants it to be funny, not scary. Which is more difficult, but if I can write it, maybe she will illustrate it. I am also reading  Mark P. Henderson's Perilaus II, with a view to a blog review.  It is a very interesting book, about a writer who wakes up to find himself trapped in the thriller he is writing.

The catheter has now been removed, so hopefully Col will be in a lot less of that famous "discomfort" from now on.  We were walking back from the hospital to where we had parked the car on Friday afternoon, hand and hand, and I was thinking how just yesterday we were a young married couple.  Now we are Darby and Joan, tottering along.

And that set me thinking about Philip Larkin's powerful poem Aubade.  Larkin had a horror of the coming death, the nothingness, from being a small child, and he wrote about it so vividly.  In Aubade he calls this "the rented world", the whole "intricate rented world" - the world in which we have such a short stay.

I hope that God will wake him during the thousand years and he will have the prospect before him of living on this lovely planet earth forever - no longer on a short term rental as we are now.  I hope we will all be there.

This morning I went to my first Pioneer Meeting.  I have been pioneering in a very minor way - just a minimum of 15 hours Kingdom preaching a month - for the last 3 months, so its the first time I have been entitled to go. The Circuit Overseer talked to us for an hour. It was very encouraging. And when I got back, Col made me some lunch!  Which was a lovely surprise, especially as its shows how much better he is feeling.

I thought the beautiful Brimstone moth - photographed by Captain Moth-Butterfly of course - was appropriate to head this blog, as in the poem I mentioned, Philip Larkin called the world's religions "that vast moth-eaten musical brigade, created to pretend we never die".

When I quoted that to the Captain, he was indignant at what he felt was anti-mothism, as  most of them do not eat clothes or carpets.  Which was not at all the point I wanted him to get from it.