Category Archives: Curiosities

Oh Joy!

Wet and windy driving conditions (North West of England), endless long strait roads over flat fens (Norfolk), my favourite service station temporally rendered a building site (southbound Westmorland Services) all pale into insignificance in the face of a FAST INTERNET CONNECTION. Oh Joy, indeed.

But the subject on my mind this evening is memory, short term memory and the loss of it which comes with advancing years. I visited an elderly woman this afternoon who struggled to remember what she had just said and what she wanted to say right now. This happens to the best of us however at a certain point in ones life I can see how very frightening this can be. The question I am left with now is how much we/society equate loss of short term memory with dementia, especially in the elderly. Just a thought, a thought with a ladle full of compassion along with it.

Many thanks to Chris and his wife in Preston Lancashire where I’m staying before going on to Manchester tomorrow for a day retreat in the center of town. Hopefully by the end of Sunday I’ll be back in Northumberland again attempting to reconnect with tasks as yet not tackled. These involve activating long term memory, which I don’t have a problem with!

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Heads Up, Look Up

Spore capsules of a moss plant carefully testing the temperature above the ice. Victor Bos

I went out for a walk today in blizzard like conditions with the intention of taking some photographs. Unfortunately when the moment came my camera told me it’s batteries were exhausted! I was fine though.

To make up for the lost snow pictures here is a photograph which came in a New Year greeting from a Dutch reader. What a brilliant picture. There are more on the web site of Victor Bos. (I’ve downloaded the Google Toolbar, which has a translation button, just so I can read his blog.)

I’d like to take the opportunity to applaud my Dutch friend who is undergoing major surgery on the 16th of this month. She is one brave woman, and such fun too!

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The Second Thought


Along with the life saving ColdFX capsules from Edmonton (thanks Mike) were a couple of clippings from Canadian Geographic. I’d heard Mike tell of the ice roads in the Northwest Territories, and beyond into Nunavut which reaches into the Arctic Circle. Each spring in late January or early February Mike dispatches truck loads of supplies to the diamond and gold mines in the far north. It is a big eye opener to see what is going on in an area of the world we could be forgiven for thinking is uninhabited and uninhabitable.

The Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road runs for 360 miles. Driving speed is 22 mph or less, trucks go out in convoys of three at a time, the ice has to be 40 ft thick to take the weight of the largest trucks. There always has to be two up in a truck and apparently drivers wave the seat belt rule to give themselves needed seconds to jump clear of their vehicle if the ice breaks. If I were up in Lac de Gras at -31c I’d have second thoughts about the wisdom of being there.

At the start of our feast today we recited the customary meal time verse, the Five Thoughts. The second thought is ‘we must consider our merit when accepting it’. One can understand this in a number of ways, for me it is a right now consideration. Eating a meal is not a life threatening activity however in terms of practice there is ultimately no room for past or future. I guess that must be the same for those truckers out on the ice.

Be careful out there!

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Seats and Walls – nine


[This isn’t one of Rev. Mugo’s pictures but I couldn’t resist adding him onto to the end of this series. He lives on the wall of a factory on a Japanese industrial estate. Actually he’s just starting to draw another picture but it always feels to me like he’s doing his daily meditation. – Iain]

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