Gone Already

My latest gadget is a thing that lets my iPod play over my car radio. Thanks to I.B. for telling me about this gizmo, and also pointing me towards the first thing I have tried out on it: a downloaded Greenbelt talk by John O'Donohue, poet, mystic, and ex-priest. Having listened to him three times this week, I was surprised and saddened to discover that he died over a year ago. Of course, I couldn't find his poetry in the bookshop -- bookshops are full of such dross nowadays! -- so I'll have to resort to the Interweb. His sonnet on the Nativity is one of those poems that pulls a cord somewhere inside.

He is one of those people who can induce a kind of passive faith, like passive smoking, by the way he talks, not about "God" (which is a difficult word, twined around with unhelpful brambles) but about people -- or, as he whimsically calls them, "humanoids". There is something to think about in his paraphrase of Meister Eckhart, which I have added to my Words of Wisdom.

Jam and Pyjamas

The garden continues to produce: sour cherry jelly has been followed by blackcurrant jam and gooseberry chutney (to a wartime recipe), and as the loganberries ripen I'm stashing them in the freezer for a future jam-making session. The white agapanthus is starting to open, and some anonymous blue flowers (Brodiaea?) have sprouted in one of the bulb pots.

We're trying not to make too much of it, but we were very pleased by Squirmle 1's success in doing a poo in his potty. He has also helped to make flapjack and produced some enthusiastic paintings. He drives us mad by trying to treat everything as a game in which Mummy and Daddy have to chase him, wielding toothbrush, trousers, shoes, sun-hat, or whatever. Meanwhile Squirmle 2's progress in sleeping has suffered a setback caused by a cold, but he has now learned how to grab things, and can shove himself a fair distance along the carpet by lying on his back and pushing with his legs.