Here’s why I applaud, feel at home with and generally enjoy the company of nurses. And why I link to medical blogs from time to time. I’m declaring my interest.

At a young and impressionable age, before reaching ten, I’d go with my parents to visit Aunt V. in Surrey who owned and ran a nursing home for the elderly. Conversation over supper in the staff room invariably included discussions about bowel movements, the prevention of bedsores and other such intimate matters. So I grew up quite familiar with subjects lavatorial and nursing matters in general. This was my introduction to the world of nursing and care for the elderly and infirm.

My parents eventually bought the ‘home’ and I learnt, first hand, some of the nursing arts: how to utilize a failing memory to help a chronic smoker to stop smoking, how to navigate ‘doctors orders’- which sometimes were clearly bonkers. If I remember correctly, in one particular case, ‘orders’ involved pulling out Mrs’ B’s eyelashes! And then one day, after her visitors had left, I found Mrs. H spitting out gobs of pink, orange, blue and yellow fragments mixed with glutinous drool. ‘Oh my dear, the sweets they brought me are HORRIBLE’! ‘Gosh Mrs. H’ they look like bath salts to me! ‘Cup of tea’?

The home continued until the residents were substantially younger than my parents, at which time they closed up shop. Around that time I offered to take on the home and run it for them. They wouldn’t hear of it, pointing out they didn’t want me to automatically just fall into the family nursing/medical tradition. As it has turned out I’ve followed in the footsteps of my great grandfather, who was a clergyman.

Retaining a sense of humour in grief and adversity, is the saving grace of both nursing and the religious life too.

Out walking to-day. The hedges and grass verges are full of wild flowers, the Dog Rose is a favourite of mine. We have a lot of them growing beside the ‘bottom road’, where I walk most days. I appreciate them as they bud, flower and then produce their hips in Autumn.

Dog-rose is the most common and widespread of all our wild roses.
“An old riddle, ‘The Five Brethren of the Rose’, gives an effective way of identifying roses of the canina group. It is a folk-riddle that has been passed on orally since medieval times. This is a version transmitted through a line of distinguished gardeners, from Canon Ellacombe to Edward Bowles to William T. Stearn:

On a summer’s day, in sultry weather,
Five brethren were born together.
Two had beards and two had none
And the other had but half a one.”

(The ‘brethren’ are the five sepals of the dog-rose, two of which are whiskered on both sides, two quite smooth and the fifth whiskered on one side only.) (Mabey, Richard – “Flora Britannica”)

Yes, to-day twas a summer’s day, in sultry weather. A good opportunity to revisit The Chimneys. Now it’s raining and the land is glad of the water.

We watched An Inconvenient Truth last evening and I guess you can’t watch that without a renewed appreciation of the natural world. As well as have ones consciousness raised, absolutely

Some time back there was some discussion about the origins of the phrase, ‘the penny dropped’. Yesterday I was directed to The Phrase Finder. What a find!

The following phrases were chosen at random from the wealth of material:

Dogs Breakfast – a mess or muddle.
Origin: This is a 20th century phrase. Eric Partridge, in the 1937 edition of his ‘Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English’ lists it as “a mess: low Glasgow”.

Rack your brains – to strain mentally to recall or to understand something
Origin: The rack was a mediaeval torture device. The crude but, one presumes, effective racks often tore the victim’s limbs from their bodies. It isn’t surprising that ‘rack’ was adopted as a verb meaning to cause pain and anguish. Shakespeare was one of many authors who used this. For example, from Twelfth Night, 1601:

“How haue the houres rack’d, and tortur’d me, Since I haue lost thee?”

Weasel words – Ambiguous or quibbling speech.
Origin: Stewart Chaplin’s story Stained glass political platform, 1900, contains this line:

“Why, weasel words are words that suck the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks the egg and leaves the shell.”

Thanks to Jonny of Do They Hurt for the link.

My ‘fairy story’ is Little Red Riding Hood. There are others with the same twist but it’s the fox representing himself as an old woman and thereby deceiving Red Riding Hood which makes it ‘mine’. It’s the old scary theme of something appearing to be one thing when in fact it is quite another. If there is anything in life that is going to disturb me, it’s that.

Story is so closely related to our lives, how we respond to life, perhaps even how we shape our lives. Who knows? I grew up with a story teller pare excellence, my mother. She told tales of adventures; hers. Tales of stepping out of the Victorian box she was born into; living in a tent in Devon in the 1920’s, driving a Double Decker bus and owning several motorbikes, showing movies without benefit of electricity cranked by hand! Growing up, all I needed to do was join her story line, which is what I basically have done! The twist at the end, becoming a religious, is perhaps the modern day ending to a life of external adventure. My mother was behind me although, in later life, she would have wished me to be behind her too, in a certain kind of a way. Very close to her death the story line was broken, her story dissolved and with that the tie between us. It came as an unanticipated twist at the end of our story together. How I know about that, is another story!

Tom of The Logogryph ponders on story, fact/fiction. And again here.

One part of the story of the historical Buddha that I love is the fact that he starts out as a handsome prince. That is, his life as it has been remembered and passed down begins as a storybook life. “Once there was a handsome prince who lived in a beautiful palace and had everything one could wish for …”

Finally I managed to change my photograph to a more recent one. It was taken almost exactly a year ago at the end of the last retreat held at the Priory in Edmonton. Many thanks to Michael who skillfully managed to overcome my resistance to being photographed and then was able to put me at my ease. Thank you, and thank you Edmonton people I think of you all often.

It is almost one year since I ceased being the Priory in Edmonton. This is from a posting I did on June 17th, 2006 titled Moving Right Along.

We are moving on.
We are moving into new territory.
We are moving deeper than our fears of the future.
We are moving past what has gone.
We are MOVING and the day is a week from tomorrow.

We are moving apart.
…and that’s a hard one, for me.