Tuesday 27 March 2018

Moping Up.

We are, quite literally, moping up.  Everything to do with my MIL is now officially out of our hands & in the grubby paws of the legal beagles who will have to sort out the Power of Attorney & lack of a will... *sigh*  A lesson in what not to do.

Actually, what I have found most horrifying ~ & it is a very salutary lesson, is how we very much become the sum of our days here on earth.  My MIL may be saved ~  but as one who has escaped through the fire. All that she was meant to be in Christ will never be fulfilled & there is nothing deep in her spirit for her spirit to draw on in these final days.  So very sad.

Meanwhile We are left sorting out ODD's insurance, which is still in our name & under our policy because when she bought the car she wasn't licensed yet & I was the primary driver.  As details emerge we are realising what a very narrow escape the girl has had.  According to ODD, she had just taken her foot off the brake & engaged the clutch preparatory to changing gears, so the bus pushed her forward, crumpling the back of the car into the front seat, rather than steamrolling right over the top of her as it so easily might have done as it was travelling @ 80k in an 80 zone.  She has some whiplash ~ but although a little sore & bruised in remarkably good spirits.

All this to try & stop the work of God as our ministry seeks to move in a new direction under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  Satan is a very slow learner...

Monday 26 March 2018

Something Kipling.

Having spent the best part of 3 days looking for power of attorney papers [found eventually in the shredder pile] we headed to the mainland Monday morning to finish our tax, hand over the papers, attend a doctor's appointment & bring Gran's car back to the island so she wasn't paying for parking.  In the nature of these things great swathes of time are spent waiting... interminably ... & so I grabbed a book from my well read pile of children's classics because all that waiting is not conducive to great powers of concentration, but boredom is lethal. What I grabbed was Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co.
Technically, I suppose, Stalky is a school story... Certainly it is set in a school but me being me Stalky was the very first Kipling I read, though not my first exposure to him.  My beloved Aunt could, & did, lie in bed in the dark & reel off verse after  verse of All England is a garden, Full of stately views... & so I knew Kipling first as a poet.  Only much, much later did I come to The Jungle Book & finally The Just So tales. Naturally the first time I read Stalky a great deal of it went over my head ~ I was that young. 

The thing is I belong to the Nowhere Generation.  Technically I am part of the Baby Boomer Generation, those children of the post war era who began life in a time of peace & affluence who flowered into Hippies & peace-nicks ~ only I was born @ the tail end, too young for Woodstock & love~ins but old enough to remember the hugeness of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, the Make Peace, Not War protests, Vietnam on the nightly news & I still think now, as I did then, that lowering the drinking age to appease the young men you want to send to the killing fields was a disgusting thing to do.  Shame on our government! My brothers, born 2 to 4 years later, do not share these memories.

So really, I should be a certain kind of person, far more liberal in my outlook & world view than I am but Stalky is symptomatic of a great schism in my life.  I understand Stalky's world far better than the one I presently occupy.  That 2 years difference is a whole other world.  I began school when you learnt to write with a pencil before transitioning to pen & ink, when all the pink bits on the map were *us* ~ the British Empire ~ an Empire, so we were told, on which the sun never set. 

There were lots of us grew up thinking *Empire* only to watch England betray the idea of empire for economics & the whole thing crumble & decay into something unrecognizable. 

But...Not everybody had my family.  My family are story~tellers.  They have it down to a fine art.  We grew up knowing perfectly well anything we had from my Aunt should be taken with a generous pinch of salt for she was well known to value the Romantic over the Truth but that heady mix also held all the family archives & so I grew up under the shadow of both the Edwardians & the Victorians for the older generation were valued & I am, perhaps, the only one of my siblings old enough to remember  a generation of long skirts & high collars, long hair & hairpins & a sense of family that at one & the same time offered security & condensation.  

Naturally the family, as a whole, were monarchists & I have, in my possession, transcripts of many of the family papers penned by deceased relatives who forged their way into the unknown to make a new life in a land that was far more jungle than garden, but when I read them it is Kipling's world view I hear for they had a sense of purpose bigger than themselves & politically correct they certainly were not! 

However it has left me with a sense of not fully belonging anywhere, straddling the generations, neither wholly modern nor fully prehistoric, but certainly with a huge awareness of the shifts in time & history, & the way we are shaped by our time & place in the grand scheme of things ~ which is why Kipling, a hugely conservative man, is now so derided for his Stalky was certainly a bully & corporeal punishment is definitely out of fashion in our schools.  I do wonder though, the sort of experiment that's not ever likely to happen, how this present generation would do if faced with the same sort of challenges because it is far to easy to mock & deride the Kipling sentiments:
If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating...


Orwell wrote, “every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.”  And therein lies the ultimate irony.  *IF* is the most searched for poem on British poetry sites.  For all the wrongness there was an idealism for people to aspire to & people are still drawn to idealism.  That is @ the core of humanism ~ that somehow people can be more than they are ~ & certainly of Christianity, which provides a way for us to rise above ourselves. 

Ultimately 2 things remain for me about Kipling:
  • Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat itGeorge Santayana
&
  • eat the meat and spit out the bones.
Seriously, political correctness is a curse.  If you focus on stuff like that you miss all the pleasure of something like Stalky which is, @ it's heart, a very, very funny book! If you haven't already, have a read.  It's a hoot.

Wednesday 21 March 2018

Goodbye,Little Blue Barina.

The thing about family disasters is that you never have to wait long before the next one
puts the previous one into perspective.  ~Robert Brault,

There are some texts you never want to receive like: Mum, I've been in a car accident.  That they are texting is probably a good thing; it means they are alive.  Coherent.  Probably functional.  It leaves a lot of unanswered questions like: who was driving?  Whose fault ~ because, you know, insurance premiums...

So according to the girl [yes, that one] the car in front of her slowed for a galah [the bird sort, not the other sort] & ODD slowed for the car but the bus behind her did not slow for either of them, straight up ODD's rear end. Ike! The 4 year old she was transporting in the back seat was carted off to hospital in the ambulance.  The car, her prized little blue barina, so very nearly paid off, is totaled.  I cannot think how she is to manage for work @ present. *sigh* Why is it my girls, who are better drivers than any of their brothers, have both managed to total a car while the boys have not?

Meanwhile I have been dealing with the social worker who is dealing with my MIL & talking nursing homes ~ where my MIL does NOT want to go & I am so over this year!  Roll on 2019.  May it be heaps better than this one has started out!

Tuesday 13 March 2018

The Cyclone That Wasn't.

After nearly 3 weeks the doctor has declared that the MOTH's mother no longer needs 24/7 care
~ though she will never be completely independent again.  There are things that should be done now that family dynamics will make impossible ~ like selling 2 cars  & a boat.  My MIL will never drive again, though it is going to take quite some time for her to accept that fact.  However we have the domestic help in place, rails for toilet & bathroom coming, persuaded her the personal alarm is for her own good & we are filling the gaps: washing, meals, medication, shopping, ~ that sort of thing. 

Finally I have been able to turn my attention to my own household, which quickly gets out of control.  Surfaces accumulate things ~ which Kirby then feels free to push onto the floor & we step around because everyone is far to busy, or just not home, to deal with the mess. *sigh*  So the MOTH is back home sleeping in his own bed again & while I pop in & out next door to check all is well I no longer need to be there for the hours the MOTH is in college.  I do worry. My MIL's quality of life distresses me: too much poor quality tv, too few visitors, not enough of anything interesting or stimulating but getting her out & about, even for short trips ,is becoming more & more difficult & far more traumatic than enjoyable for her.  I don't think we can bring her home again the next time she lands in hospital ~ & that will only be a matter of time.

Meanwhile the tropical low that has formed in the Coral Sea is refusing to decide whether it will be a cyclone or not.  The rain & wind have arrived but the low itself is neither fish, nor fowl nor good red herring! Depending on the day & time it is a cyclone ~ or it isn't.  It isn't expected to cross the coast either, which is a jolly good thing given just being out there is causing enough rain & wind & tidal surge to bring no~one any joy.  These things are, always & forever, completely unpredictable & the Met people are not known for getting these things right, so, like everyone else, we will have to wait & see & hope Linda continues to slide down the coast until she peters out somewhere south of us.

Sunday 4 March 2018

A Little Pooh.

It was my brother who owned When We were Very Young.  I bought The House @ Pooh Corner for our lot.  I could recite, @ one time, all of James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree/ Took great care of his mother/ Though he was only 3...
but I wasn't a fan myself.  Talking animals, talking toys were never my thing ~ with one notable exception: Rumor Godden, who had a knack for writing about dolls as real people.  So though I have read: The Wind in the Willows; all of Narnia; some of Watership Down ~ which I hated & thought absolute drivel; Charlotte's web; some Beatrix Potter [plus an assorted lot of not so classic animal tales] I was never enamoured of them because animals don't talk.  Easier to believe in things that simply don't exist than pretend things that are not so ~ so a good deal of well loved children's classics left me cold. That included A.A.Milne.

I was far more interested in the little boy who somehow was, yet wasn't, Christopher Robin.  So I knew he had had a love/hate relationship with his storybook self & because I knew that I was intrigued when Good~bye, Christopher Robin came out. I never did get to the movies but I pre~ordered the DVD release which I finally got my hot little hands on last week & watched with some dismay.

Now I have issues with how the upper English classes raise their children anyway: Nannies & prep schools followed by boarding schools & live in universities & a detached atheism~ honestly, no wonder the English breed strange eccentrics! And no wonder the children of so many of their writers came to bad ends: the Nesbit lot & the Peter Pan 5 ; the Mitford lot ~as Christopher Milne so nearly did.

That any parent, even ones so self~involved as the Milnes were, could use their child as they did is simply appalling, even given the historical period. So this is not a *feel good* tale of pooh~sticks & snuggly toys ~ though that is, of course, part of it.  The trauma of WWI lurks in the background.  The fear of the next war is an ever present threat.  In between is this magical childhood that Christopher never managed to escape.  As the grown Christopher says to his father: I asked you to write a book for me, not a book about me!

This is also a quite beautiful movie, in the way of English period pieces.  The scenery is stunning; The  period farmhouse atmospheric & the acting top notch.  What it is not is terribly historically accurate ~ though perhaps that doesn't matter because Christopher & his father had completely different understandings of what actually took place with the success of Pooh.  For Alan it didn't impact family life though he was furious & embittered that his trivial children's writings forever defined him & his more serious work never received the attention he felt it was due. For Christopher Pooh forever defined him & it took him his whole life to come to terms with the first 10 years of his life.

I think that is sad.  Is anyone to blame? Probably not.  It was such a different world & when you have read as many authors from this period as I have, it really is not so terribly surprising.  Off hand I can't think of a single one whose personal views weren't rather jaded & whose personal life didn't reflect an amoral atheism that resulted in lives of personal chaos.  That Christopher came out of it as well as he did, finding personal happiness in his marriage & quiet life as a bookstore owner is a tribute to him.