What can you say?

Photo by Steve Johnson on Pexels.com

To find a vaguely suitable image for each post, my usual method is to think about the post. What one word might sum it up? Failing that, does any particular association or memory remain in my mind after writing it – lateral rather than literal? This can go a bit far. I think I wrote a post recently called “Not To Worry, Mary” which wasn’t even about a lady called Mary, but a reference to “making a mary of something”. For all I know this expression may only be current in one small corner of This Sceptred Isle. Readers in America, Canada or even north of the Watford Gap might have no clue. And the only thing that popped into my head as I hovered over the search box was

“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. “

So you got a picture of a lamb.

I just wanted to let you all know that I’m still here (and reading your posts) even though I haven’t been feeling up to posting for a spell. I’ve had a flare up of a hideous tummy pain thing. It doesn’t happen very often but when it does I’m usually in for a fortnight of it. So, I have been living on mugs of cold water, Slimfast ( the banana is nice, the chocolate tastes like four-year old cardboard boxes) and Paracetamol and no doubt sending my electricity bill through the roof by constantly boiling the kettle to refill my hot water bottle. I do seem to have lost some pounds though. At this rate by Summer I will be svelte enough to skip up and down the back lawn in a bikini. At least after dark.

And the Ukraine thing has really knocked me for six. I’m a news-addict but have had to give up watching more than a quick summary of the situation per day. I feel quite desperate that we are not doing anything except gasping in horror, waffling, setting up funds for this and that and saying how heroic those poor people. And yet (in theory) I understand the reasoning – not wanting to cause a Third World War.

I suppose the reaction may be because I was born shortly after the Second World War. My parents and grandparents (who had been through the First World War) seemed to talk about nothing else. I would be sitting around, the only child at that point, mostly under the table, and they forgot about me. Well, I was a forgettable child. I heard a lot of bits and pieces of stories that way. Stories of bombed roofs falling in on babies, which remained miraculously unharmed, having to eat horse-meat but not being told, etc. Maybe I would not be one-finger-typing this post so many years later had I not been so gripped by random snatches of conversation drifting down from Above The Table-Cloth.

The War seemed to consume my whole childhood. Everything related back to it except me. I had somehow failed to be in existence at the proper time. And then they started testing Atom Bombs and Mum had her nervous breakdown, allegedly because of it. War was not an event to me back then but a person. Another member of the family.

So, what can you do, with physical pain close to home and genocide taking place only two hours away by aeroplane? I have sat squashed on the sofa between multiple un-accommodating cats, alternately binge-watching the silent-but-deadly “Reacher” – if only you could just send him in to knock a few heads together violently / picturesquely – and repeats of “The Great Interior Design Challenge”. Completely useless but they keep me sane. Time to top up the hot-water bottle. And maybe another Slimfast…