R's rue

Koh Lanta, Thailand May 2013 "Having just looked back ten years, can I realistically look forward ten further years? Another decade? Exactly the same span of time. That would bring me to 2023. But will I get there? Will I ever reach my seventieth birthday? Somehow I doubt it. Death will probably come to find me before then. But if fortune gives me ten more years, I guess I need to start thinking even more urgently about how I will use those years. I don't want to squander the time, I want to live it. These precious ten years ahead will pass all too quickly as the past ten years have proven and only then will this random blogging cease my friends. Only then will this Yorkshire pudding be totally digested. Till then I'll keep on keeping on." I wrote those words in this blog ten years ago - back in May 2013. The early deaths of several male members of my family has always limited my own expectations of a long life. But now, as I approach my seventieth birthday lat...

  I’ve seen hundreds of vigils in my time I’ve seen hundreds of vigils in my time Perhaps even a thousand . One sticks in my mind more than any other and it was in Sheffield in the 1990s  It was with a young man in his twenties.  A slight, Bonny lad with pink cheeks and brown hair.  He was unconscious and sadly brain dead and he had a mother and six brothers who were sitting with him in shifts. I was working nights and it was very dark and very cold  as Sheffield winters often are, And he was in a dark side room with his mother who was sat in a chair and a younger brother who was asleep on a mattress on the floor.  Now, because the mother hadn’t slept, one of the sons had fashioned a paper shade cover over each lens of her spare glasses, so by slipping them on she could effectively shut out the light of my inquiring pen torch when I came to assess her son in the middle of the night. What we hadn’t factored in however was the youngest son’s se...

 Once you finally make a decision such as the one I described yesterday, I don’t know why I thought I’d wake up fully hyped on faith to surrender. Newsflash:  Didn’t happen. I’m praying to surrender every moment, but I didn’t wake up full of optimism. I’m listening, but internally I’m fighting. I don’t want to fight. It’s my default. That’s what I’m calling it. Here’s hoping I can make surrender my default setting.  from R's rue https://ift.tt/YcwPJN1

  Night shifts have come around awfully quickly this week.  Back tonight. I finish Saturday morning which will mean I can watch Eurovision in the Hall Saturday night. Bluebell needs more work this morning, but that’s the only big job of the day to sort. I’ve already given the dogs their big walk and mown the lawn.  My sister is due to do the garden but is snowed under by bookings The garden will be transformed in a week or so when the alliums bloom. At the moment the aquilegia and forget me nots are. Filling the borders with their gentle colour And the cheerful Welsh poppies are poking their yellow heads in the few gaps left from Going Gently https://ift.tt/pHUOQdF