DIARY: Ruminations, Occasional thoughts & happenings - as they arise
Summertime - 29 June, Wednesday
Last Sunday I decided to take a break - well, I was thoroughly p****d off by a number
of things:
I had been trying to make a DVD, of a film taken during poor
Anthony's funeral Mass (see last entry), failing miserably despite hours
of work (about 48 - actual hours). This put me in a bad mood - sick
with tiredness and frustration - and then I had a phone call from son Conor in
Dundee telling me that he had a broken foot, which would prevent him from
working (he's got a job in University Security - throwing the drunks out of the
Union!).
"Means I have lost £120, which I would have earned
during an all-night function last night," he says. "and I've got my left
foot in plaster and they won't let me work. They say I'm a Health and
Security risk!"
It also appears he will not be able to look after Tony Blair
and the G8 leaders this coming weekend! He had obtained three days of work
in Edinburgh, which would have netted him four hundred quid, sufficient for his
rent and living costs for the next few weeks.
Woe is him and woe is me, his doting Da (you suffer with your
children.) - all because he was larking around, coming back from a night
out with some of his mates. Stupid, ebullient youth! (I can vaguely remember
being one.) Larking around, full of drink, throwing flour at each other,
leaping up some steps, Conor stumbled and broke the big toe of his
left foot. Now he is on crutches, and his exchequer is just as
broke.
So last Sunday I was more than a bit peed off, and after
Mass, followed by lunch in the golf club - succulent chicken smothered in cheese
sauce, washed down by 1/3 Litre of Erazzerizz Chilean, with a digestive of two
Hennessey cognacs followed by a fine coffee - I decided to refrain from servile
work, which in my case would have been hammering away on a computer keyboard. So
I kept the Sabbath holy by slumbering away in the gorgeous summer heat of my
back garden, temperature about 23oC
This was me, among grass and weeds,
looking up at splendid canopy of summer green
It worked! After a few hours I began to feel healed, a
bit more human.
That was last Sunday, when we had our Summer!
Ach no! That's a lie. While it has been raining overnight,
and I am sure there is more to come, and the sky is grey, at 6.23 am, the
ambient temperature is great.
Lovely to be able to walk about in my nightshirt, scratch and
rejoice that for a few weeks we are removed from winter chill.
I really love the summer. I wish we had more of it - but not
as much as you John Johansen!
John and his lady Renate live an Gran Canaria.
Temperatures there at the moment are between 30 and 35oC, he tells
me. He grows great lemons.
These are some of them -
- but they're not as beautiful as the splendid shades of green that appear among the grass and weeds of my back garden - and in my lovely overhanging tree!
Thanks be to God for summer!