The Summer Season must have started, as suddenly we have visitors. We have an Aramco reunion booked for this week - meeting up with 3 old friends (2 of them over from the States) at the local pub for lunch - and then back here for coffee and ice-cream.
We were hoping Roger might be able to join us, but going by his recent email, he won't be around for a month or so yet. I only wish Jacks could be with us as in the old days.
And then we have the usual family visitors booked for August, in what has become something of a tradition. I hope that the little girls will have some wonderful seaside memories from this, as I do from distant Cornish holidays. Our flat beach, pebbled - but sandy when the tide is out - is so different from the rocky Cornish coves with their splendid rockpools, but the children seem to love it nonetheless.
I wonder if I can find something in the family photo album to go on this blog. So I had a browse and the above is from Roger's leaving party on Planet Expat, which must be a good 18 years ago now. Captain Butterfly is the one on the end with the colourful shirt.
Our Expat life - 25 years of it - seems like a dream. Hard to believe it, and all that travelling, happened. And our retirement years are flying by, faster and faster.
Jehovah tells us that to him a thousand years are but a day. And I do realise now that, if we have the undeserved kindness to be on the earth in the Thousand Years during which paradise and perfection are restored, it will go so quickly. And so joyfully!
And then our real lives on this splendid planet can begin, never to end.
Friday morning was a doctor's appointment, and next week I have a date with the hospital. On the doubleplusgood side, I got to the meeting Thursday night in Pixel form, and it was so refreshing. As was the meeting this morning. It is always a great comfort when the teaching really gets to me, in spite of all my faults and failings - and there are one or two. "AND then some" I seem to hear Captain Butterfly chiming in from the next computer where he is researching today's finds.,
We woke up this morning to headlines saying that America has "obliterated" Iran's nuclear sites...
What horrors will follow I do not know. But we will find out soon enough. The poet Tony Harrison has a line in one of his poems which says "Your crimes abroad brought home as civil wars"...
Do I want Iran to have nuclear weapons? NO, NO and NO again! But then I don't want anyone to have them. No-one can be trusted with them. We are still living in the tragic times following the loss of Eden during which "man has dominated man to his harm".
But I do think that Iran is entitled to nuclear power, given we have it. And also, once Israel got nuclear weapons, every other state in the locality was going to want them.
And indeed if we live in the Darwinian world of "kill or be kill, eat or be eaten" that the world's Movers and Shakers would have us believe, of course we should all be armed to the teeth, as then wouldn't the only be rule be "might is right"?
But, thank God, we do not live in that world - and we are not abandoned to this. A rescue is not only on the way, but imminent now. And how much we, the damaged children of disobedient Adam, need it!
What a tragic mess it all is.