Happy Easter

The completed fireplace in use with proper, real flames. Nice and cosy like a country fireplace should be, especially when it's snowing outside. For as long as we are enthusiastic enough to lay one. New mat and curtains in due course. We had a relaxing weekend with Miss P, going out for coffee twice and to a small fellowship in a nearby town on Sunday. They showed a Rob Bell film. Now is that good or bad, do you think?

Laura's Story

I have just finished writing a booklet entitled 'Laura's Story'.
It's an attempt to explain the facts of my grandparents' life, to work out how a hymn-singing upright woman came to take another man into her home during World War 1, and why my grandfather went to war right at the beginning of things when he was too old really to need to do so. The facts were gathered, and much interpretation and imagination applied. Did I get at the truth? I guess I'll never know. The moral being: ask all the questions you can before your Aged Persons pop their clogs.

Exotica

We are Joe Bloggs in a Land of Exotica. There are some colourfully named people here. To hint at just a few:

Marcus T-McC,
Sir L.F.
Faraway
Annesley
Sheen
Thain
Hildegarde
N V-S
Phi

We haven't found Quirian Overbecks yet, though............................

Finished!

Here it is, the work of art. Next step, a new carpet due on Monday.

Now that a fireplace is growing.............

New arrival

To quote Maggie Thatcher: 'We are a grandmother'.

The new Swiss baby arrived today. Hurrah and Hallelujah! Strange to think that yesterday she wasn't and from today she will always be a part of our lives.
We hope to make her acquaintance in April.

Poem

Here in the village, it is Lent Group time. One group is studying poetry. Not a lot of God in it, but beautiful verse. Here's a sample. It's by a contemporary American poet called Mary Oliver.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?