The Chocolate Tip

This lovely moth turned up in the Moth Trap Hotel a couple of nights ago.  Its a Chocolate Tip - and an extraordinary creature.  I do wonder what its inner life is like, what its thoughts are - and if it will give our hotel a good review on Tripadvisor.

I have my 6 monthly trip to the dentist coming up this week, which is not something any of us look forward to. I just hope that it will consist of a painful clean, but nothing more. And we have both been asked to sign up for our next Covid jabs, which will be the week after next... will I survive yet another one?  Well, at my age, the question actually is will I survive till next week?

Every day is a bonus from now on. Such a bonus. The gift of life seems more wonderful by the day, even now, in this fallen world, full of tragedy.  

We paid our Spring visit to Lower Trees Nursery to get the rest of our Nemesia and some more Geraniums for the balcony. The Nemesia are not spectacular flower wise, but are wonderfully scented, and they stand up well to the punishment from the sea. The Geraniums, also tough and hardy, provide the spectacular side. We now have a magpie visiting the balcony. The poor thing got a shock when it landed on our railings to find me sitting there.

I got some good health news on Tuesday (a rare thing at my age) when the Dentist said he was "very pleased" with me and the state of my teeth.  That was a after a few severe questions about my lifestyle and tooth-cleaning regime that I answered satisfactorily.  Hurray!

Today I made an apple crumble in the morning - taking the hint from the apples the Captain turned up with - and Zoomed with a friend in the afternoon, Her husband is facing quite a big operation next week, which puts my worries about my teeth into sad proportion.

The Mystery of the Pyjamas that Didn't Bark in the Night

I wanted to say something about that weasel word "adult" (with apologies to weasels everywhere about my choice of words).  Oh and it occurs to me that I must search The Captain's Log to see if he has a picture of a weasel in his gallery.  I did. He had. 

See above.

But when you see, say, a TV programme with a warning "This programme contains adult content", what does that word "adult" mean?

Doesn't it usually mean that it will contain the sort of material that especially dirty-minded schoolchildren snigger about round the back of the bikeshed?  So in this Newspeak context (thank you George Orwell), the word "adult" means "not adult at all".  But the point about the word is, presumably, to imply that anyone who dares to object to vile content is simply being childish, immature.

I do remember how the world and its Movers and Shakers sneered at Mrs Mary Whitehouse. Yet of course she was right - she saw the thin end of a very nasty wedge  - nasty beyond belief sometimes - and spoke up about it. 

Centuries ago, Jehovah said this to the Israelites, words he had recorded and preserved to this day:

This is what Jehovah says, your Repurchaser, the Holy 

One of Israel: 

“I, Jehovah, am your God,

The One teaching you to benefit yourself,

The One guiding you in the way you should walk.

If only you would pay attention to my commandments!

Then your peace would become just like a river

And your righteousness like the waves of the sea.

Isaiah 48:17,18

Those words are as true today as they were then - as they always will be.  If we will listen to our Creator and do our best to follow his guidance, we can have peace even now, in this dangerous and fraught system of things on the earth. And we can have "the glorious freedom of the children of God" in the restored earthly paradise - peace without end, like the endless waves of the sea.

Re the heading of this blog, Bea and I have been in correspondence about some mysterious pyjamas which have turned up in her luggage. They do not belong to her, and they do not belong to us.  It may need a Sherlock Holmes or a Jonathan Creek to solve "The Mystery of the Pyjamas That Didn't Bark in the Night".

Could I write that one up?  Nothing has come to me yet. Except of course that it would be much more mysterious if the pyjamas DID bark in the night... hmmm...

It was such a lovely Spring morning - sunny, but cold.  My walk from car to Kingdom Hall took me past cherry blossom blooming above flint-knapped walls and birds hurtling about with twigs in their beaks.  The drive back was past a turquoise sea, calm under a tender blue sky with  a scattering of fluffy white clouds in suspension.

Captain B is at home today, which is nice.

Bluebells and Cuckoo Flowers

 

These are some flower photos Col took on Sunday.  Will we manage a bluebell walk this year?  If so, Jacks will certainly not be with us. It used to be a regular thing for the three of us, along with our trips to London and Chichester.

We talked to her very briefly on the phone, and she is not doing well at all. She does not want any visitors so we can't call in. Not that we would while we still have these lingering colds anyway - when Col isn't coughing, I'm sneezing and blowing my nose.

Her oldest son is living with her, so she is being well looked after. We have had some lovely friends in our time. But have we ever had a friend like Jackie?  Its hard not to think of, in the words of Janet Frame, "the sadness that belongs to the world".

Growing old is to travel into a strange new country.  And Jacks is a couple of years ahead of us in the journey. None of the medical professionals who help us with it - and for whose help we are very grateful - can know what it is like as they have not been there.

Many people have written about it, and poets down the ages have lamented the shortness of our lives, the inevitability of our death. The "world" - the current wicked system of things on the earth - is of course determined that we should believe that there is no problem, that we evolved - that the tragedy we are living in is normal.

It is not. It is a tragedy.  But we are not abandoned to it.  Our Creator's original intention was that our first parents should enjoy life forever in the earthly paradise. And that is what He is offering to every one of us, their dying, damaged children, right now.

Think of bluebell walks in the restored earthly paradise...

... and what about cuckoos?  When the Kingdom of God is ruling over the earth will they still be pushing other chicks and eggs out of their nest?  Will they be building  their own nests?  Or maybe their enormous chicks will be benevolent big brothers and sisters, there to help their adoptive parents and their younger siblings?

Anyway, the thing is, please let us all be there to find out. Because the very first chapter of Genesis tells us that nature was not created "red in tooth and claw with ravine", and both Hebrew and Christian Greek Scriptures promise us that the Kingdom of God will restore that peace earthwide.

And Jehovah always fulfills his promises.  Isn't that the very meaning of his name?  There will be so much to know, so much to find out.  And all of it will be joyful and wonderful.

Bea and Co

As we are now.  Captain Butterfly in the foreground wielding the camera, me lurking behind him, saying "Make me look like Kate Moss, only lovelier." Him saying: "But the age of miracles is passed, my dear".

Our first family visitors of the year came in the shape of Bea, Simon, and cousin Elizabeth.  They joined us for lunch on Saturday, Bea and Simon being on their way back up North, having done a brief family and friends tour.  We haven't really entertained since the family was over last year.  Our social life has been pretty much nil since Lockdown. We are not recluses, both being busy with our own things, but we live in a different way from the old days when we had people round most evenings (in our expat life), then at least at the weekends. I guess we both need and like a quiet night in these days.

I know I do.

We were only providing a sandwich lunch - to fit in with their arrival times, dependent on the traffic, which on a sunny Saturday on the South Coast can be bad!  As indeed it was. They all made it and we had a long and leisurely lunch: cheese and chutney (home-made chutney, made with Captain B's own fair hands), ham and mustard, and tuna pate and lettuce sandwiches, plus some lovely sweet tomatoes from Waitrose, followed by lemon drizzle cake and mini millionaires' shortbreads.

And Col took Bea for a short walk to the sea. She has an art project on that requires a photo of our beach stones. She is the artist whose illustration provides the cover of The Umbrellas of Hamelin.

I hope we all enjoyed ourselves. I know the Captain and I did. 

On Sunday, Himself was doing SUSSAR training in the morning, then detectorising in a field, somewhere, and I had a morning in Zoom, joining the Chi congregation for the special broadcast from the Governing Body.  Our congregation watched the live version on Saturday morning, so obviously I could not join them at the Hall.

We had some lovely video updates of our brothers and sisters round the world, including the small congregation on the Falkland Islands, and then two talks from visiting members of the Governing Body.

The first talk was very appropriate being titled: DO NOT TIRE OUT  and the second was about the need to keep awake spiritually: KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN

What an antidote it was to the bad news we woke up to on Sunday, hearing that Iran had chosen to retaliate to the attack on their Embassy by droning Israel, and now America and the UK is getting involved, on Israel's side.

None of them are listening to our Creator, the God of Abraham, or none of this would be happening.

And the age of miracles has not passed. We are surrounded by miracles, as we always were. Every flower is a miracle of artistry and engineering. Tiffany jewellers at their finest could not create one of them. And the progress of tiny egg, to caterpillar, to pupa, to butterfly is a miracle in plain sight.

And please look up into the night sky on a clear night.  This sparkling immensity did not come from nowhere.  Think of having forever to see all this and learn about it and above all to enjoy it.

That is what our Creator is promising us - is holding out to us. Isn't that what we want  - to enjoy life forever?

The Great Stink

I have chosen a discreet and tasteful photo of a Stinkhorn Fungus (taken by Captain B of course) to head this blog.  Their Latin name is Phallus Impudicus, and they are well named, so I had to be careful in my selection.  This is a young one. Col assures me that they don't actually stink at this stage.

The reason for the choice is that Col and I watched a programme on Sunday afternoon about The Great Stink, which hit London in 1858 - less than a hundred years before I was born. The Thames had become a giant sewer, with all the city's waste being discharged into it, including sewage, waste from slaughterhouses, tanneries, etc. There had been warnings from a young doctor and a scientist that these were the conditions for a cholera outbreak. Although it was not well understood at the time that cholera - a fearsome disease - came from the polluted water getting into the water supply, not from the miasma, or stench itself.

The stench, I guess, was the warning, to be wary of the water.  And at that time many of the poor who lived by the Thames were taking their water from the river - the river of sewage - as it was their only source!  Then came a baking hot summer - the hottest on record, possibly. It went on for weeks and weeks.

In the steaming hot summer of 1858, the hideous stench of human excrement rising from the River Thames and seeping through the hallowed halls of the Houses of Parliament finally got too much for Britain’s politicians – those who had not already fled in fear of their lives to the countryside.

Clutching hankies to their noses and ready to abandon their newly built House for fresher air upstream, the lawmakers agreed urgent action was needed to purify London of the “evil odour” that was commonly believed to be the cause of disease and death.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/04/story-cities-14-london-great-stink-river-thames-joseph-bazalgette-sewage-system

This of course led to the creation of the vast sewer system that serves London to this day. 

Bazalgette's work ensured that sewage was no longer dumped onto the shores of the Thames and brought an end to the cholera outbreaks; his actions are thought to have saved more lives than the efforts of any other Victorian official. His sewer system operates into the 21st century, servicing a city that has grown to a population of over eight million. The historian Peter Ackroyd argues that Bazalgette should be considered a hero of London.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink

What an engineer he was!  And thank God for him.  But given we are hearing every day of sewage being dumped into our rivers, lakes and seas, it is hard not to wonder if The Great Stink and all the attendant medical dangers could return.

Shouldn't it be so clear by now that, as the Inspired Scriptures warn us, it does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step?

Even our best, most sincere, efforts to put things right have only a limited success. It all comes back to our need for a perfect, and loving, worldwide government - the heavenly one - the Kingdom of God.  It is the government whose coming we pray for when we say the Lord's Prayer.

Storm Kathleen and The Speckled Wood

Storm Kathleen was causing stormy seas on Saturday - and it was blowy.   But it wasn't cold, and so I did sit out on the balcony to do my Watchtower Study in the morning. It is a beautiful study article "Jehovah has tender affection for you".  

Col, feeling a lot better, both kneewise and coldwise, left early to do marshalling. It earns money for SUSSAR, which has to finance itself.  He then had a Moth Walk in the evening - well, not so much a walk but helping a group of people set up their moth traps in the woods. They chose such a stormy evening that not a moth was seen, beyond one Col found by the light of his torch.  But he decided not to go out a'detectoring on Sunday, so we had Sunday lunch together after I got back from the Kingdom Hall.  He had chicken veggie soup and apple crumble and custard.

Monday was two medical appointments - oh the joys of old age.  Blood test in the morning - yet another - and a face to face visit with my GP in the afternoon. He is a nice young chap I had never met before.  He was running very late, but he did examine me, and put my mind at rest about one worry.

Col kindly chauffered me to the afternoon appointment as it was not in our local surgery and parking is difficult there. And when I came out I found him busy photographing a Speckled Wood which was posing on the bushes in the carpark. Our first Speckled of the year.  See the beast itself in the photo above.  Once again, I wonder if they remember their caterpillar life. I hope so, as then it would be like one of those wonderful dreams when you find you can fly.

There was yet another storm blowing last night - I was up in the early hours taking some emergency painkillers (as I so often am these days) - and the wind was howling and the rain was lashing down. I don't know which storm it was, but I will call it Storm Speckled Wood for the moment.

We found we had made the national news this morning as our river has burst its banks.  They will be evacuating those who live in the basement flats along there - or so I assume. The warning for others is to stay above the ground floor of your house.

It has been storm upon storm and I guess it was just too much for the river in the end.  My bro in Sydney emailed a few days ago to tell us that the flood water in his area of the Northern beaches has reached the end of his street.

The weather is, of course, one of the many things our first parents found they could neither manage nor control when they made the fatal decision to cut themselves off from their Creator and go it alone.

But we know that Jesus has the authority from his Father to control the immense system of the weather, as he calmed that violent storm on the Sea of Galilee.  The account of it is at Mark 4:37-41.

It ends this way: But they felt an unusual fear, and they said to one another: “Who really is this? Even the wind and the sea obey him.”

It would greatly benefit us if we would think urgently about that - about who Jesus really is - as it is only through the ransom sacrifice of his perfect human life that we can have back the life, perfection and paradise that our first parents so tragically lost.  

The Ministry School

The pic is, I hope, giving you the subliminal message: BUY MY BOOK, PLEASE.  It was inspired by the two house of my childhood and I hope it is both funny and scary.

I was on the School on Thursday night - first part - a 3 minuter - the brief is on the website JW.org under the heading of: Library, then: "meetings". But basically it was about being flexible when witnessing, being prepared to go with what the person we are talking to is interested in, not what we have set our minds on telling them.

So this was the script I wrote for last night. I set it in a hospital waiting room.

Sue:  I hope you don’t mind my asking, but what time is your appointment?

HH:  It was for 10.00 o clock. They are running late today aren’t they?

Sue. They are. I am before you, so they are running well behind.. But they are always so busy.  I have brought some studying with me. I thought it might cheer me up to read what the Bible has to say about the time when there will be no more illnesses, no more sicknesses. (My intention at this point being to read Isaiah 33:24, however...)

HH:  The Bible may make all sorts of promises for all I know, but shouldn’t we be more concerned by what we are doing to this lovely planet?  We are making it very sick, terminally so I fear.

Sue:  You know that is a very good point.  Even if we were to come up with a wonderful worldwide NHS that offered a cure to everybody, it wouldn’t be much use if we had damaged the whole planet beyond repair in the meantime.  Is this something you have always been concerned about?

HH:  Well yes, More so as I have got older. 

Sue: And for sure you are not alone in that. I think many people would agree with you. But would you be surprised to know that the Bible has something very important to say about that.

HH.  Yes I would. I thought the Bible was all about going to heaven.

Sue:  When in fact it is telling us what is going to happen here on the earth.  If you had created this lovely planet would you allow it to be ruined by the greed and violence of some men?

HH: No, of course, not if I had the power to stop it.

Sue:  And our Creator, whose name is Jehovah, is the one who does have the power as he is the Almighty God. And more than that he has actually promised us that he will. May I show you this verse from Revelation, the last book of the Bible.  Revelation 11:18 ends with this assurance, that Jehovah will “bring to ruin those ruining the earth”.

HH:  To bring to ruin those ruining the earth.

Sue. Yes - a simple and clear promise. But back then when it was written down, two thousand years ago, would it have seemed possible we could bring a whole planet to ruin, let alone the only planet we have to live on?

HH.  No.  In fact I don’t think we could have imagined such a thing even a hundred years ago! But clearly we are going to.

Sue.  True. If we are left to ourselves we are.  But it is so reassuring when you understand that we are not abandoned to this.  I am sure, like me, you will have said the Lord’s prayer in your childhood and asked for God’s Kingdom to come.

HH.  Many times.

Sue.  So I would love to show you what the Bible says about that Kingdom, and what it is going to do here on the earth. But I see that the lady ahead of me is back at the reception desk making her next appointment, so they will be calling me in at any moment.  Are you a user of the internet?

HH.  Yes. I can google things and do email. But that is about it.

Sue:  Good for you. That’s great. So please may I leave this little card with you. You can use it to get to the website JW.org and if you put “The Kingdom of God” into the search you will find a wealth of Biblical information.  I have put my email address on the back if you have any questions - and I would love to know what you think about it.  Yes, they are calling me now, I will try not to take too long.

HH: Don’t worry, take the time you need. I am going to look up that website now, on my phone.

Ruefully though I have to admit that I am no good at all at witnessing to anyone in medical situation, which is a shame as I am now in so many of them... it is something I need to pray about. All I seem to want to do in such a situation is to get out of it as quickly as possible. It usually goes like this:

Doctor/Medic: (looks up from file as I enter the door). And how are you today?

Me: Fine thank you. Can I go now? Bye.

Really one can only cope with doctors, hospitals, treatments, wards, etc, when one is strong, fit and healthy. But that is never when they want to see you.

Well, in consolation, I come back to Isaiah 33:24 which I mentioned above, as it promises us that when the Kingdom of God is ruling over us no resident

 will say: “I am sick.”

It is a promise to hold on to, especially in old age.