The Scent of Lupins

Col had a metal-detecting Thursday, just like old times, the alarm clock clanging at 5.00 in the morning, and the Sandwich Fairy visiting the fridge.

He is still pacing himself though. He was back early - and he won't be out detecting at the weekend.

On Tuesday we joined the queue at the carpark to get our next Covid jabs. All went well, hopefully, and I got my half hour in the sun just standing in the carpark. In the afternoon I did what I think is my final bit of work for MABLE - the Massive Autumn Book Launch Event by Fantastic Books.  It was an introduction to my collection of short stories that will be published at the event.  Col helped  me, and did the techie stuff, for which I am very grateful.

It is short, but I hope it's interesting.  

We - my siblings and me - would now like to write a sort of memoir of our father, who was an architect.  I am wondering about approaching my memory by using lupins.  

In his childhood, growing up in the fields and forests of Belarus, the farmers used to plant their fields to lupins every few years - maybe seven, I'm not sure. Apparently it refreshed the ground.  And daddy said that as a child he remembers lying in a field of lupins feeling almost drunk from the scent.  I put that memory in my book Disraeli Hall.

He always grew lupins in his garden - a memory of home, I guess.  It was a home he had been exiled from first by war and then by Stalin's iron curtain.

I used to watch for the little green shoots coming up in early Spring in the black earth and then marvel at how some of them turned themselves into perfect little lupins.

In my heart, I knew I was seeing a miracle. But I did not reason on it - not realising that I was seeing the creation telling me of its Grand Creator, Jehovah.  It seems sad - tragic really - that for all the intensive religious education I had at my convent schools never once did anyone point out what the creation is so clearly telling us. I believe I would have responded.

It would have been such a protection too against the bleak and truth-obscuring theory of Evolution, which is promoted so strongly by "the world". And it remains that too, just a theory, and one that is full of holes - which to be fair Darwin himself acknowledged.  But surely all we have since discovered, and are discovering, about the complexity of the creation, is making the veil of Evolution, which is being used to hide the truth of Genesis, more and more flimsy.

The poet Dylan Thomas spoke of "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower".   What is that force?  It is, as the Inspired Scriptures tell us,  the spirit of the Sovereign Lord Jehovah.

The Big Heat continues.  Our Green is rapidly turning into a Sandy-Brown.  And the News is heartbreaking.  The manmade flooding in The Ukraine - I guess the war is responsible, whether it was done deliberately or not - is causing immense suffering, and will go on doing so.  There are massive wildfires in Canada, and we continue to see the increasing of lawlessness worldwide having its tragic effect in our streets.

The Thursday night meeting was an oasis of sanity and loving-kindness in a mad mad world.