SEVEN DAYS

This time next week, deo volente, we will be celebrating the marriage of Elisabeth and Rob.   I, having very few duties, am drowning in lists.   When I start having lists of the lists, it’s a problem.   But items are slowly getting knocked off the lists…    I think we might just make it, and have a happy day.

I probably won’t talk to you next Sunday!

A FINE AND PEACEFUL PLACE

When I was a young girl in Banffshire, we lived in  a house whose rear windows backed on to an ancient cemetery, where I would wander and wonder at grave  stones which went back to 1600.   Some might be graced with images of  skull and crossbones, with the ominous injunction, always heard by me in deep tones of gloomy warning, Prepare to Meet Thy God.   I always found it a quiet, reflective and comfortable place.

This week I went with John to look  at some of the art on display in Ditchling, and wandered through the village cemetery.   It was sunny, and I sat on one gravestone which was table fashioned, with my feet on another and reflected that I still feel very comfortable in the quietness of cemeteries.    The lichen covered stone was warm beneath me, a blackbird sang from a tree in the corner, and when we walked later, we discovered a lovely pond hidden by the edge of the  graveyard.

John thought to sit on a gravestone might be disrespectful to the dead, but I felt surrounded by peace and calm.   When I left, I bowed my head.   May they rest in the peace I felt among them.

THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS

My usual easy of flow of writing seems to have deserted me, temporarily, I hope; so I will offer a reminder of an incomparable writer, in the complex but lovely sonnet below.   (Of course I do not need to record that t he writer is William Shakespeare.)

Sonnet 116.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments.   Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no!  It is an ever fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the  edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.