Bombast

Well, I'm sorry for neglecting this log, but it's been busier in my little house over these last few weeks than it's been for at least a year. Pen has come home, and so it is time for us to start packing up. I've been organizing with various people over the last few months for the move, to hire myself a aid up in Malkirk, to get the house ready, to prepare finances... Luckily for me, Pen has been a very good girl since coming back. She was always a bit of a troublemaker but she's doing better now, and she appreciates the gravity of the situation.

So it's been busy. I've taken a few looks at the new house, through the computer, and it seems cozy enough. The Malkirk primary school said that they would be happy to facilitate Penny's 6th year. They also said they'd be happy to facilitate any problems she might have. The headteacher seemed like a very nice young woman, and we're apparently living in a similar area to her. From her I heard some more about the neighbourhood-- it seems to be a nice enough place, with lots of children, so hopefully Penny will make friends easily. The main church in the town isn't Anglican, but some sort of Greek Orthodox or such as far as I can tell. There's not too much information on it, but there is an Anglican church in the nearest town over, so we'll likely be visiting there. The Malkirk church does seem to have a good youth club, so I've signed Penny up for it to get her out of the house. 

The main move will take place in 10 days, giving us plenty of time to get settled before the school year begins properly. Pen is a little brooding currently, but before long I'm sure she'll be more excited. I think she's glad to be out of that hospital, to be honest. She didn't enjoy her time there at all.

Applesauce

I suppose I'm not too good at this. I have a girl who comes and helps me clean up (it's my knees, you see) who also helps me with more technological things like, well, this log. She's been out a lot more these last few weeks, since she's working three jobs at the moment. I wish I could pay the poor lass more so she wouldn't have to work so hard, but I haven't the money to increase her wages. I don't like to speak badly about people, but I can't say I'm fond of the way Mr. Cameron is trying to fix our government. Ah, well, I can only hope it works.

This is really a journal entry to record some of the bigger happenings in my life. For one, my granddaughter Penny will be coming home from the hospital next week. She's been doing much better, or so the doctors say, and I'll be able to enroll her in school for this coming September. This brings me to my second bit of news, that being our moving to the countryside. The city may be good for an old goat like myself, but it's no place to raise a child. In any case, I feel like my time in London is done-- it's dizzying for me to get from place to place, and I don't like driving my car here. It unnerves me.  I will miss the sounds of the city, but the silence of the countryside will be a nice break for a while. We'll be moving at the beginning of August to give Penny some time to settle in before school starts. It's a big change, but I think it'll be a good once. I phoned the school up in Malkirk, and they said that they have an attentive staff that should be really good at helping Pen with her issues.

Malkirk is a small town up in the Lake District, known for its abandoned monastery and its folk legends. The region is pretty mountainous, but I think we're both up for the challenge, and the fresh air'll do Pen good. It's one of the nicer, more even towns. I reckon this move'll be good for both of us. It's at least nice to get away from the smog and the hospital, to get a fresh start.

Soul

When I was young but oh so old
I drowned within a drought
As my skin was burned with winters cold
And the man who came in went out
As I climbed down to the attic
I smiled myself a pout
And I wrapped through the door paper thick
As the man who came in went out.

T'was my birthday today, so I'll put up a poem in celebration. Today's most morbid of topics is one that does plague the mind when another year turns away-- death. I often muse to what happens to the soul once one is dead, a morbid exercise you will agree. I believe after death we go to a new place, a good place, where we can see once more all those we love. Of course, one is allowed one's own beliefs. Just have to wait and see, I suppose.

Staple

I bought a stapler today. Little metal bits holding other things together through a couple of well placed holes and just the right amount of metal. It’s definitely related to a staple, then, the thing that is the centre, the main of it, the indispensable, basic, fundamental core of an item or an object or an idea that holds the whole of it together. It was a red stapler, very clean, very needed to gather the papers that hold the words of my life together into little organized piles, ready to be accounted for as I try to buy my new house. It got me to thinking about what the core is, although I’ve already discussed the core of life in general, and what used to be the core of my own life in particular. But what about the present, for it is in the present where we live. What of it?

I look out the window as I type, and it’s beautiful out there, you must know, city lights and rain are the best things, because they’re life. City lights may drain the environment but they point to people living, and rain gives life to everything it touches, even the dead things. And I look out through the rain onto the darkness of the streets that are only lit by the lonely lights of insomniacs such as myself, and I wonder what the fundament to my life is. Probably little Penelope, my granddaughter. You see, Penny is, well, the last of my grandchildren. No parent should outlive their children, but especially not their grandchildren, no matter the circumstance. I have to take loss with the grace of God but that can’t stop me from weeping, especially not for Penny. I’d rather not talk about it myself, at least not unnecessarily and not yet, but Penny needed to talk. She lets it all ball up until there is nothing left but that ball.

Dear Penny is in the hospital for it, and all. She was injured out of the fire, but the injuries to her mind hurt more, needed more attention and care. So she’s staying in the hospital, away from me, her only family. I do go and visit as much as I can. It’s a difficult task though, what with my knee. She always seems pleased to see me at least. She draws all the time, quite the little artist, but has a much greater fondness for mathematics, probably from her father. I never had much of a head for the stuff, but she laps it up. She’s a smart little lass, our Penny.

Balderdash

One bright September morning in the middle of July,

The sun lay thick upon the ground, the snow shone in the sky.

The flowers were singing gaily, the birds were full of bloom;

I went upstairs to the cellar to clean a downstairs room.
I saw ten thousand miles away a house just out of sight,

It stood alone between two more and it was black-washed white.
 

Bananas

A couple of days ago, I was buying a banana flavoured ice cream for my granddaughter (she loves the stuff, but I can’t quite stomach it), when I was reminded about the second Great War. It seems an odd connection to make, doesn’t it? But really, it isn’t. I barely saw hide or hair of a banana even before the war began, and by the time I was in the countryside working the farms there were even fewer, if you can believe it. A world without bananas was of course not only a world without bananas; it was a world without pineapples and rubber and milk that was fresh. What the world did have was sugared almonds, sunsets, hard work, and Polly. Polly was an inspiration, but I wouldn’t have met her were it not for the grace of God above. I’ve always believed in the right to live every man has at the fundament, life breathed into them, their spirits created out of the ether of the spirits. Humanity itself is based on the fundamental human life, each one, small, large, evil or good. And so I knew that the deaths of millions could not be avenged by more deaths, and in protest, I signed up to help on the home front.

I dug potatoes. I dug potatoes and helped the middle class townfolk do the hard work that their husbands and brothers and cousins had done before them. Of course, many of them being the tough old country folk that they were knew exactly what they were doing and resented a daft young city lad coming in and trying to show them which end was which. So it was really more for myself that I worked, and I did my best to help in what capacities I knew, as a young lad does. I stayed most nights in a small farmhouse, not the one that I was working on, since their rafters were already stocked to the gills, but one about half a mile away. It was a tiny little house, garden in need of weeding, itself in need of a good repainting and a bit of carpentry. Both the sons and the father had heeded the call of the country and queen and marched off to war, leaving the mother and three daughters in charge of the acre strong farm. It was there I met Polly.

Her mother was a voracious woman, and reminded me of a Valkyrie in size and personality. She was really the fullest woman I’ve ever met, stout minded and stout hearted. You can picture her pretty well in her mind, a short thick woman with a red face and red hair, strong, and wore mostly blue. She had small eyes that wrinkled with a smile or a frown at the first opportunity given, and that was the one thing my Polly inherited. Polly’s two younger sisters were interchangeable redheads in personality and appearance, fourteen year old twins with a, shall we say, “playful” demeanor. Freckled, unreliable little daemons they were. Now Polly, well, she was a brunette, much like her dad—he must have been a rather feminine man because she had a sweet, heart of a face and round lips so unlike her mother’s. She was a lot more rounded and muscular than you see in a lot of girls today, but she had to be, out of bed at 4 as she was. She had to have the pigs fed and breakfast ready before anyone else was even awake.

I met her because of God, and this is something I believe in vehemently.

Quintessence

I’m visiting my granddaughter tomorrow, and that reminded me of this blog which I, in absent minded old age, appear to have forgotten about in its entirety. Oh dear. What to write, what to write. Well, that’s the spirit of the thing isn’t it; the heart of the matter, the tale we are telling is the centre of it all. I would be hard pressed to find the centre of my own story, that one revolving event for which my life was created. I’d probably have to say that my faith is the centre of my existence, to see God and to love God and to serve God. I know it isn’t very P.C, but I did serve as a missionary for a time, mostly in Africa but in South America for a while also.  I did most of my service in the slums of cities that were both poor in money but rich in people, a difficult contrast to say the least. I tried my best to be more a teacher of methods than a Bible thumping converter, my job description being in my mind to teach and show a path instead of forcing down my one, which is only one of many. I wanted to show these people, these children the force of my God’s love. Of course, it’s easy to show people that love exists, but harder to prove that it’s for them as well.

If I was that word, then my wife was the action, the movement that made all I said viable, that love and worship and relationship were all intertwined integrally as the most important things the soul needs. My wife fed them, you see. Over her life, she fostered over forty children, and dozens more stayed with us for a day, two days, as long as we needed. She never closed a door, never kicked someone out, and she managed to rear all three of our own children well on top of that. She was sweet, and kind, and gentle, and forgave all mistakes. She worked and volunteered all she could wherever she could, and prayed for those she could not help directly. She was the grace of God personified in my mind.

Sometimes I wonder where she is now. But thanks to the certainty blind religious faith allows me, and yes, I do know my faith is blind and stumbling, but that does not mean it is without thought, and in any case thanks to it I am able to think of my wife as safe in the hands of the Lord I love and that both of us served throughout our lives. He has her in his arms, and he knows her goodness, just as he knows the light that is in the soul of all living people, the life and greatness one person has. She is in a good place now, a place of that light.