Category: family
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Blue Badge
I’m working up an annoyance into a rant, with a view to evolving it into a solution. If you’re not in the UK (and other regions may have similar systems), the Blue Badge is a permit that allows disabled drivers and or passengers to park more easily, including in places otherwise restricted. For some, that…
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So long and thanks for all the…
It’s been a hard year to blog very much, without spiralling into Covid anxiety, Brexit rage or any of dozens of conspiracy scenarios spread both in the social and news media. So I’ve not had much to say, or at least have decided not to say it. As we rip away our citizenship of a…
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The Story Tree
The idea of bringing trees into the house at Yule and Christmas began in Germany and was adopted in Britain in the sixteenth century and gained widespread popularity during the reign of Queen Victoria (of the German House of Hanover). It probably harkens back to Christian times, but nowadays is almost entirely secular and celebratory.…
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We all gonna die…
So, the conversation has inevitably come around to “what happens when we get it”. For the uninitiated, Janet is on the ‘extremely vulnerable’ list because of the kidney transplant and the immunosuppressant drugs she has to take. Covid-19 is not something she would walk away from. In fact, probably neither would I, because although I…
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"Can you hear me, mother?"
Day five million and three of the Coronavirus lockdown. You would think it impossible, really, to lose your iPhone when you’ve barely left your room, much less your house. Instead, it turns out to be rather easy. Janet has a habit of losing her iPhone, and asking me to ring it. Then it’s a race…
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Corona Wars
It’s hard, really, to hate Covid-19. It’s doing what it does. It’s ish-ness is to survive, breed and propagate the species. We humans have been ever so successful at doing that for millennia. To hate a thing because it attacks you is to fail to understand its essence. Nonetheless, we are under attack. We knew…
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Kidney Day!
There are seldom many days between good reasons to open a bottle of bubbly in our house, and today is the second anniversary of Janet’s kidney transplant. This complicated photograph shows her brother in the background, doing the “proper” photograph, while I nick a quickie from the side. Two years! Such a blessing to have…
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Rites of Passage and Passing
I lowered a lovely man into the earth today; an unexpected honour and not a little emotional. Along with a few others, I carried his wicker coffin from the bier on which we had pulled him to his graveside, and gently ran the tapes through my hands as he was accepted back into the land…
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A day in the life – Remembrance
Previously blipped on my daily journal (ie not this one) at https://www.blipfoto.com/Incredibish Awake at silly o’clock, because Janet is on gate duty and has to open the village hall for six thirty. Because she’s then wide awake, there is vacuum cleaning from seven… At eight thirty I go and set up the public address system…
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Ancestry and GDPR
One of the perennially interesting discussions at Druid Camp is ancestry and the ancestors. Druidry largely concerns itself with relationships of all kinds, with human people and non-human people, with awareness of landscape and season and cycle, but there is a tripartite feature on ancestors that inspires and embraces those relationships. Within (at least, modern)…