A bit of a nothing day

Yesterday was a bit of a nothing day - an afternoon of butterfly paperwork - and Captain B was stuck in a traffic jam for ages.

I felt a bit depressed, which I rarely do these days. Though Bea has cheered me up by offering to go through my talk with me on the phone. We will use the blog version.

I talked to Audrey and to Richard.  It rained a little bit in the afternoon.  I am still resting a lot - not much option, though the knees are slightly better.   I was reading a new (to me) biography of Jean Rhys.  "The Blue Hour" by Lillian Pizzichini.

When I was a child, Jean was living in Cornwall.  She would have been about the age I am now, so we were  in Cornwall together, but at the opposite ends of our life.  It was a place of magical holidays for us, as for some years my granny had a house at Praa Sands - now one of the foremost surfing beaches - then wild and empty.

How differently we saw it all.  Jean Rhys at the end of her life, me at the beginning of mine.  This is a little poem I wrote about it years ago, probably after I read the Carol Angier biography.

I CAN’T BELIEVE JEAN

by me 

I can’t believe Jean

That you and I

Were in Cornwall together

You write of freezing March weather

I remember only sun.

Of course we were never there in March.   But Cornwall set the standard for the seaside for me - rocky cliffs with sea pinks growing on every ledge, wild seas, empty sandy beaches, with rock pools full of anemones.   It was a place full of wonder and fascination and danger.    

We live now in a flat, neat, municipal seaside, but it is still an amazing thing to have the sea coming and going and surging and roaring just outside the window, and to see the enormous Sussex skies, deep blue with high fluffy white cloud in summer, and to see "the red wing" of the sun rising above the Channel in the winter mornings.  I was on the balcony studying after lunch. The sky was a perfect blue with one enormous dramatic swathe of white cloud - it was all racked up towards one end, and fat and fluffy at the other (like the best sort of cat). And the Channel underneath was a deeper more sombre blue - but it was covered in sun sparkles, so much so that it was almost white in parts.

The creation tells us so clearly about its Creator, Jehovah of armies.  I hope to be speaking about the importance of sanctifying, or hallowing, His name, at the meeting tonight, as I talk about the importance of making it known.