Hello, and how has your week been? It was my birthday, so we tried to celebrate whilst also keeping to the current covid restrictions. Last weekend I met some of my children for a socially-distanced walk, and then we shared slices of cake in a carpark. It was lovely, but not as comfortable as sitting on sofas in a lounge.

On my actual birthday I was treated to breakfast a’ la husband, which was smoked salmon on muffins with poached eggs and hollandaise sauce, grapefruit halves, and chocolate money in gold wrappers scattered across the table. I felt very spoilt. In the afternoon I took my mum to Chiddingstone Castle, and we walked to the Chidding Stone (and got lost and ended up walking through a field of cabbages!) Then we ate the remains of the carpark cake before I went home.

the ancient Chidding Stone — Chidding Stone

We spent the evening having a family quiz on zoom, where we each had prepared 10 questions. It was very funny, especially the round where we were presented with extracts from our family chat and we had to guess who had written them.

Have you put up your Christmas decorations yet? I noticed lots of houses were decorated in November, which helped to brighten the weird winter we’re having. I suggested we could do the same. We didn’t. Instead we bought our tree today, after a trip to the dentist. I hate going to the dentist, don’t you? Of course it was even worse this time with all the fussing about with hand-sanitiser and masks and not being allowed into the waiting room but freezing outside until the nurse came to fetch us. Actually being a dentist must be even worse — staring into all those germy mouths and wondering if covid is going sneak past your visor and make you ill for Christmas. Not a job I would relish.

Husband kindly drove me to the dentist, but this meant that he was also involved in the tree-buying decision. Needless to say, we now have a tree that is much too big for the space and we will spend Christmas peering at each other through the branches. But the house smells nice.

As if covid isn’t bad enough, I now have to avoid bird flu as well. Apparently there is another outbreak this year, and we all have to keep our poultry inside until it clears (it’s carried by wild birds, and keeping the chickens in their coop is the only way to avoid contact). They are all very grumpy, and try to push their way past me when I open the door to feed them. I’m sure they produce extra levels of poop when they’re locked inside in retaliation.

My Greek lessons continue to be fun and challenging in equal measure. I recognise more and more words in my Greek New Testament, though am still at the stage of saying: “I’ve learnt that word…but I don’t remember what it means.” Not yet very useful, but I am getting better. I have an exam in January, which is terrifying because December is plenty of time to forget absolutely everything learnt so far.

Another morning in my week is taken up with a Bible Study group that I belong to: BSF. It’s all online now, but mostly I like it because I am studying the Bible with a group of women who all live in my town. We do differ in our opinions, as some people tend to take the Bible very literally, and others place it very much in the context of the time it was written and then look to see how it applies today. This week we looked at the destruction of Sodom (lots to disagree about in that particular story!) However, something struck me for the first time.

In one of the daily questions, it asked why Lot didn’t want to leave Sodom. (A quick reminder: Sodom was a city of evil people who did things like gang-rape visitors, they ignored the poor and lived self-indulgent immoral lives, and God said he was going to destroy the city. But when Lot — a man who followed God — was told to leave, he didn’t want to.) Why would Lot not want to leave when he knew there was so much evil in the city? And then I thought, it’s like Christians today who don’t want to die. We know the world has evil things, horrible, unfair things happening. And we know that God has prepared a better place for us, that he will take us safely there when it is time for us to go. And yet when we think about dying, about leaving what we know –even though it’s not perfect — we’re not so sure that we want to go! We don’t want to walk into the unknown, even when we know that God can be trusted. We are a bit like Lot.

You can mull over that idea during the week — it will help to distract you from all the political debates if nothing else!

Hope you have a good week. Thanks for reading.

Take care.
Love, Anne x

In an attempt to keep warm during my morning run, I have started to wear my son’s old school rugby shirt and a bobble hat my daughter gave me. Husband informed me that I looked like a ‘Where’s Wally?’ cartoon which seemed harsh. But perhaps he has a point. . .

Keeping warm on my run, but looking a little like ‘Where’s Wally?’

He Fancied His Mother, So We Named Him Pharaoh

Hello, how are you getting on with this very strange year of 2020? I keep thinking I am used to it—I have come to terms with the fact that every book-signing and fair has been cancelled this year and I really am not going to be selling many books—and then something else is cancelled, and all the frustration returns. I am obviously not alone, because our town is planning to have an ‘open day’ on 3^rd October. It was planned through our town Facebook group (usually the place for people to rant about potholes and inconsiderate parking). Lots of people make crafts, or are artists, and we are all discouraged by the lack of places to sell our work. So, on the 3^rd October, we are all going to place stalls at the end of our gardens, and people can walk or drive around town, looking at what’s on offer. To be honest, I doubt if I will actually sell any books, but it’s rather nice to have something in the diary, isn’t it?

Of course, all my animals are completely unperturbed by Covid-19. The ducklings are now on the pond, and—wonders!—they are all female. (You might remember that last spring, all my females flew away in the search of mates, and I was left with a pond full of obviously unattractive drakes.)

The chicks I hatched are a cross between the white Leghorn chickens and my grey Legbar. I am really hoping that the females will lay blue eggs, but they are still too little to lay at the moment. The Legbar cockerels are no more, as they started to get vicious. I only have one full-grown cockerel at the moment, and he is very beautiful but rather sad, as his mate died last week. He keeps running to all the places she used to go and calling for her—so my garden is very noisy at the moment. The relationship was a confused one, as she was also his mother, so I named him Pharaoh, because marrying siblings and fathering children with daughters seems to have been quite a thing in ancient Egypt. I was very confused when I was studying the lineage of the Pharaohs, as there are so many weird couplings—they have a very narrow family tree—it’s probably just as well many of them were sterile and the line died out.

We went to the beach last week. I was feeling depressed with life, so Husband rearranged his schedule, and we zoomed off to Camber with the dog. Kia loved it, and it ‘did my soul good’ as my granny would say, to see her running through the waves. When she had her twisted stomach at the start of the year (really—what an awful year this has been!) my fear was that after such a big operation, she would never enjoy life again. But I can report, that whilst she is beginning to feel her 13 years, Kia is still tremendously excited by sea and sand and seagulls.

On the way home, we had lunch in a pub (The King’s Head in Playdon). There was hand-santiser strategically placed, and the staff wore masks, and the tables were well spaced, and every customer had to leave their contact details. It all felt very safe, and encouraged me to think that eating out doesn’t have to be risky.

But then we went to Ashdown Park Hotel for lunch on Sunday, and that was entirely different! The staff did nothing at all to guard against Covid. They didn’t wear masks, we were given the same menu folders as other tables, they placed the food and drink directly on the table, and I wasn’t aware of any extra wiping or washing or screening at all. Such a shame, especially when they must be struggling to cover their costs and need customers to return. It was a lovely venue, but annoying they aren’t doing more to stop another peak.

My fears for society are reflected in the vocabulary in Mandarin I am learning so that I can chat with my friends:

Jingji weiji shi hen dou gongsi daobi, ye shi hen dou ren shiqu le gongzuo.

经济危机使很多公司倒闭，也使很多人失去了工作。

Which reminds me to tell you: I have decided to study ancient Greek and Hebrew. I often feel frustrated when I discover that something I thought I understood in the Bible has a completely different meaning when you look at the original language it was written in. I realise that if I don’t start to study the things I want to study now, then suddenly I will wake up and I’ll be too old. I have signed up for a course that begins at the end of September, and I am very excited about it. I shall tell you all about it when I start.

On another brighter note, the plum trees have loved the weather this year and my freezer is now full of plum crumble. When I walk, the hedgerows are teeming with blackberries and fat acorns are dropping from the trees. There are also a whole new lot of weird fungus growing on my lawn. We might have had a rubbish year so far, but nature remains beautifully abundant.