It’s amazing how quickly we forget. Less than 3 decades ago no-one had heard of email. When someone said “mail”, they meant a letter in the post. A hand-written, hand delivered piece of communication that couldn’t be rushed; couldn’t be followed up immediately; couldn’t be tracked instantaneously. It had to be posted in faith, and received physically, emotively.
Apparently “April showers bring May flowers” is a well known expression in the Northern hemisphere, and seems to indicate that they are more aware of the treachery of April than I have been. April, in a word, “sucked”, and I’m boycotting it – hence the date on this post! It wasn’t pretty. I won’t bore you with a full list of the ills attributable to this fickle month, but I do want to tell you about the end of my love affair with my car. Continue reading
I phoned a friend the other day. In fact, I phoned several friends for a reason I’ll get to in due course, but this one conversation really stuck by me.
This is a friend who knows stuff. She knows all my stuff – the good, the bad and the unacknowledged. We have shared tea and cake, late night phone-calls, and sitting on the lounge floor in tears. We have graduated together, we have celebrated together, we have fled together – from Statistics and from various other forms of inhumane torture. We know the shape of each others’ hearts and can pick up where we left off no matter how long since the last visit, the last phone-call. As I said, she knows my stuff.
On Sunday evening the Barefoot man and I were in the car on the way to watch “The King’s Speech”, (highly recommended, as I’m sure you’ve heard) when I happened to look up at the streetlamp hanging high above us at the intersection and noticed that it was actually moving in a wide arc above us as the wind pummeled it around. It’s always a bit disconcerting to find that things that you thought were pretty stable are actually quite mobile, so I commented on it to my Barefoot man who said wisely, as he is wont to do, “Well, its better to bend than to break.”
Indeed.
A lesson I learnt when I decided to leave corporate life instead of hit the wall – quite a good decision so far, I think.
And it happened again recently on my first multi-day hiking experience.
January is one of those months that I find comes screaming out of the corners at me full tilt when I’m still trying to hold on to the slippery wondrousness of time at leisure in wonderful places. Continue reading