Hello, and how is your 2026 going so far? Last year whizzed past, so I might keep the Christmas decorations under the bed this year to save me scrabbling in the back of the cupboard. But maybe that (the time-whizzing thing) is just because I am getting older—time definitely goes faster as we age.

We went to an event this week which would suit any age—the annual town Tractor Run. I’m not sure if other rural towns do this, but where I live, every year all the local farmers decorate their tractors with lights and tinsel, and parade through the villages honking their horns and flashing their lights. It’s brilliant! I dragged Husband along this year; I could tell he wasn’t keen as we stomped through the dark lanes, and risked the cars whizzing along the main road, to the nearest viewpoint. There were lots of other people—families and couples and people walking their dogs. My town is good at community events.

We stood next to the road, in the dark, waiting. After a few minutes we could hear horns, way off over the fields, and we knew they were coming. There were a few cars, and a motorbike flashing his lights (not sure if he was part of it or just entering into the general mood). Then the tractors arrived—I’m guessing about 200 of them, giant ones, ancient ones, tiny ones; some looked not much bigger than our lawn mower, others could have moved a house. It was terribly exciting—I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was the lights and noise in the dark lane, maybe it was the size of some of the machines (maybe it was all the hunky young farmers!) I thought it was brilliant. I do enjoy a good parade.

Another thing I have enjoyed this week is a book by Richard Todd. He’s no relation, although I have met him a few times because two of his brothers married two of my aunts. When I heard he’d written a book, I bought a copy (partly because I happen to know that publishing a book takes a lot of courage). He was the head gardener at Anglesey Abbey, and the book describes his career, interspersed with how he believes God has guided him. It’s not a complicated book (which is very refreshing after reading lots of theology books, which do tend to make religion seem very complicated). If you are interested in gardening, or just want something nice to read at bedtime, I recommend it.[1]

Do you have times when you read certain books? I do. At bedtime, I like something that’s easy to read, nice and relaxing. But if I wake in the night and I can’t go back to sleep, I tend to read theology books—which tend to be slightly boring, but also make me feel I’m not wasting time so it doesn’t matter if I’m sleepy the next day. This does not work for the few theologians who write well (like Moberley or Clines) because then I become engrossed in the book and the night disappears. In the afternoon, when on holiday, I like something interesting—my favourites are John le Carre or Joanna Trollope—which are very different authors but they both have a nice turn of phrase. Their books are like sipping a good red wine next to the fire.

I don’t watch much telly, although Husband and I do enjoy watching certain series (usually on Netflix or even DVD—remember those?!) Our big secret is that several years ago, Husband gave me the entire boxset of The Good Wife and we have already rewatched it THREE times! It’s disappointing how much we have forgotten each time—especially when we watched it for the third time. Whole plots are like new. Which I guess is one of the many good things about growing old—bad memory means you enjoy the same films and books more than once. I hope you enjoy something this week—whether it’s a parade or a book or a television series.

Thanks for reading.
Take care.
Love, Anne x

PS. For those who follow my blog regularly, my last two venesections were both cancelled because my iron levels have remained normal. I am extremely thankful for this and hope it continues. I am always cautious when talking about ‘answers to prayer’ (because what about the prayers that appear to be ‘unanswered’?—how do we explain parents who have lost children, drought-ridden areas when people pray for rain, those praying for the end to war, etc?)

[See my blog for further clarification: https://anneethompson.com/2015/11/19/prayer-doesnt-work/]

All I can say is that I did pray for the impossible and ask to not need more venesections, and the last two have been cancelled. Make of that what you will. I’m due for another one this week, so waiting to see what the blood test says…

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Walking-God-Garden-God-Given-Purpose/dp/B0G7F14GWP/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2LLRXGRB55S7X&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.xV9dKDMs3Ak8Aw9-hPn1O3ZOldwCyiAMOfOmU42n7VRpLO8Vl8b8d1ItvpXIVoN6GTZq_44b_royZ4Pt0XXgmWFkceKC7PKH9YefUErtSq43Z9voA9rckbNJgTJMmCZjqzzXvcESRlTYOOAVIlbZTEPJ5ON3BCUdyetrjRCQw3yisQyAQCv6hSGDM6wJiEaLPeHbRL-AumyZgHKeCVlcgY-UdTMh29fJBkElK9toySc.0FZzvnVk7k73ODroPM1a-vkoSicpZJyQPxcFaQVvKc8&dib_tag=se&keywords=richard+todd&qid=1767200622&sprefix=richard+todd%2Caps%2C135&sr=8-1

Thanks for reading.
anneethompson.com
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Feeling Pointless

Hello, and how are you? Here is a blog I wrote a few years ago, but never posted (perhaps because it was too ‘raw’ at the time). Hoping it helps someone.

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I have been struggling this week with the feeling that I am, to be frank, fairly pointless. This is something that has dogged me throughout my life, as I have never managed to motivate myself when things seem pointless. ‘Where is the point,’ said my 16-year-old self, ‘of learning French, when I cannot afford to ever leave the country?’ If I couldn’t see the worth—the  point—of something, then I didn’t do it. To feel that one’s self is pointless is therefore bit of a problem, and not one that is easily solved.
My children have all grown up, they have independent lives and have studied things I don’t understand and all work in offices (whereas I only know classrooms) so their conversation is smattered with words like sprints and neds and nids, and difs and dofs (okay, I made up the last ones, but you get the idea?) I feel left behind, a little bit stupid, and really rather pointless.

There have been times in my life when I felt like I mattered too much. A working mother, with a husband who was always in the city and three young children and a house to cope with, life was so busy I didn’t have time to wonder whether I was pointless, I just had to make it through the day. Perhaps therefore this introspective issue is one reserved for people with too much undirected time. Perhaps busy people don’t stop to wonder. (Perhaps they should.)

I am at a ‘funny age for a woman’ so some of my feelings might be due to hormones rather than actual fact, but I see it in other people too. I look at what I have achieved in my life, and feel that it is all finishing, and I am left with nothing to do that’s worth doing, and I don’t want to be that frivolous person who has hobbies. I want to be up there, with the nurses in casualty, with the politicians making decisions, with the artist who produces something that affects people. I want to matter.

I suspect that lots of people felt pointless during the time of lockdown. Many people were stuck in their homes, possibly furloughed from work, not able to use their skills and talents. We feel pointless, we need to feel that what we do, our lives, has some worth. And sometimes, frankly, they don’t.

This is a problem that I also see with older people. As people approach the end of their life, when their body doesn’t quite manage to do all the things it used to do, when they can no longer be the person who goes up the ladder to fix the light, or carries the shopping, or caters for the crowd, then they start to feel a bit pointless. When the time comes to stop driving, it hits even harder. If you can’t do things, then what is the point of living? I hear this voiced (in different words) by people suffering a major illness. If you’re in so much pain that you can’t function, then what is the point? Why not end it now?

Even busy people actually, are fairly pointless. They work hard, they strive for wealth—but they never have time to enjoy it; or they want to be promoted to positions of power—but after a while someone else takes over and they retire and it was all for nothing. It is like chasing the wind. There is no point, not really. You work hard, you earn security, and then you die and someone who hasn’t worked, who doesn’t deserve it, enjoys everything you have achieved. So, why bother?

Before you all go and throw yourselves under a bus, I have a few thoughts.

I think that actually, on our own, we are all pointless. Time passes very quickly, and you will grow old, and lose your abilities, and die, and in a few decades you will probably be forgotten. So, as the writer of Ecclesiastes wrote, you should find work that you enjoy, and make the most of the life that you have.

We were all created for a purpose, and I believe that even more strongly than my feelings of despondency. Therefore there is a plan for my life, and if I manage to follow that plan, then my life will not be pointless, it will be part of a whole wonderful eternal plan. Which is what I want, need, long for. And this, in case you were wondering, is why I am a Christian. I want to be on God’s side, because he is eternal; following him is not like chasing the wind, and he gives my life meaning now, and will give my life meaning when I’m older. I might not see the whole plan now, some things will only be clear with hindsight, when I look back; sometimes I might lose sight of the plan altogether and wander off a bit. But if I keep trying to follow God, to every day ask him to guide me along the right path, then what I am will be worthwhile. My life is a tiny, but useful, essential, part of the whole. And that is worth living for.

Thank you for reading. Take care.
Love, Anne x

PS. When I initially wrote this, after a few days of absolutely everything going wrong, plus it being my dad’s birthday and I always miss him on his birthday, I had a mini explosion and told my family how I was feeling. They were all super-supportive, and I received flowers and loving messages and felt thoroughly loved (and a little guilty for having exploded). If you are feeling pointless, perhaps you should be brave enough to tell someone close to you. It might help.

Thanks for reading.
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I don’t have time to write much this week, but I was wondering—do you have an ethos for life? A sort of ‘code’ that you try to live by?

The thing that I most often try to remind myself is this: You only have one life. Life is short. Live well.

Of course, ‘living well’ is open to interpretation, but for me it means trying to live each day in a good way, a way that makes the world a better place, the way that I think God wants me to live. I realise that living well will be different for different people, but I still think that as a whole, this is a good aim in life. I also try to evaluate how I am doing, to spend a little time at bedtime assessing whether I think I have managed this. Usually I have not, and there are things I wish I hadn’t said or done. But again, I think this is a helpful thing to do—not to beat myself up, but so I can be deliberate about trying to change in the future. I think it is possible, as we get older, to live better lives than we did when we were younger. (Not, I hasten to clarify, better lives than other people—of whatever age—but better than we used to when we were younger.) Maybe, if I live to be a thousand, I might be a holy person.

This time of year is especially important for me to remind myself of this aim (to live well, not to be holy when I’m a thousand). It’s very difficult to prioritise our time as we near the end of the year, and Christmas looms ever nearer, and there is so much that I want to do. Days are not long enough.

Therefore, as I juggle the building stress of knowing I still need to buy lots of gifts, and I ought to clean the floor, and I really need to spend a few hours studying, and I haven’t had my eyes tested for ages and I need to sort that, plus all the regular stuff that has to happen in order to live. Sometimes it’s too much, and I need to stop, and remember. I need to decide what is important today. What needs to go on a list for tomorrow, and what can be fitted in but only if there’s time. And when I am doing stuff—going to the optician or rushing into the supermarket for milk or walking the dog—am I doing it well? Am I making the world, my little bit of the world, better? Sometimes it’s not so much what we do, but how we do it.

I will leave you with that thought for now, because I am trying to decipher a book about Hebrew punctuation, so that I can then decipher the Hebrew. It’s very interesting, but quite complicated, and not many people seem to explain it so I’m rather pleased that I managed to find a book about it. Reading Hebrew is very like reading a secret code, and you need to look for clues beyond the words sometimes. Meg is less interested, and keeps coming to poke me with her nose, so I shall have to walk her soon. But I shall try to do both things well. Because I only have one life, and life is short.

Hope you manage to live well this week. Thanks for reading and take care.
Love, Anne x

Hello and how was your week? Mine was difficult—one of those weeks when you look in the diary, and wish you could zoom straight to next weekend. Which, given how short life is, seems a shame, but sometimes the whole week just looks horrible. I survived, fuelled by having had a lovely rest in Crete, and supported by my wonderful husband and friends, I have made it to the weekend and it was not as bad as feared. (Excuse the ** below, the AI censors won’t allow certain words. Don’t read this if medical details upset you.)

My main problem is my health, which I find very irritating. I feel like I had my ‘thing’ when I had the brain tumour, and now it should be someone else’s turn. But life is not like that. As you will know from previous blogs, I have haemochromatosis (my body stores too much iron) which means I have to have monthly venesections (they remove quantities of bl**d) with a bl**d test a few days before. I am a complete wimp when it comes to having things stuck into me, so it never goes well (though I am pretty much used to the bl**d tests now). But however much I pray/recite poetry in foreign languages/ breathe calmly, at about 300 ml my body goes into shock, decides it does not like what is happening, and I go all woozy, and the poor nurse who is struggling with my dodgy veins has to stop. Last month the nurse decided she needed help, so she pushed the ‘emergency’ button (I was in a separate room—usually I am just parked in the corner of the oncology department with all the patients receiving chemotherapy). Soo embarrassing! An alarm sounded round the hospital (Husband, in the waiting room, thought it must be a fire alarm which everyone was ignoring) and my room filled up with people. Really, I cannot describe how embarrassed I was. There were hundreds of people in the room—the ‘crash team’ had arrived, complete with trolleys to resuscitate patients, and oxygen, and monitors—the whole works. I kept apologising, telling them I was fine, but they told me I was completely white, and strapped an oxygen mask to my face (I think mainly to make me stop talking) while they checked my heart hadn’t stopped and things like that. Of course, everything was fine except that my silly body had panicked and sent all the bl**d to my vital organs, leaving nothing for the poor nurse to drain and not enough for me to remain vertical. They gave me a cup of tea and sent me home.

Therefore, this week, my first venesection since my crash-team experience, was not on my list of favourite activities. Monday was the bl**d test. The lovely nurse tried to use my left arm (because the nerves are damaged in the right arm, and it hurts my wrist, even when working at elbow level). Left arm is empty, so right arm it was. Survived. Monday night, the hospital phoned to say they could only see bl**ds for liver test (another thing that seems to be a bit broken, which my GP is trying to fathom) so please could I go back for another bl**d test on Tuesday. Tuesday, second bl**d test, in hospital, and clever nurse managed to find enough bl**d in left arm. Then I had two days off, hoping they would phone and cancel my venesection (like a child, hoping an exam will be cancelled). Friday, I went for the venesection.

All went well, no crash-team involved, clever nurse (a different one) managed to extract a full pint (which never happens). Yaay!

So that’s my week, fully survived and less bad than I feared. Life is often like that isn’t it—the things we dread turn out to be not as bad as we thought—and the absolute sense of relief when they are over is wonderful. I now have three weeks of ‘normal,’ spending time studying, and sorting the animals, and pootling round the house—these are my favourite weeks. My next venesection is on 21^st November, but I will be less worried next time—they are never fun, but at least I know the crash-team will not be a new feature each time.

I hope your bad weeks are less awful than you fear. Sometimes, we just have to get on with stuff we hate, knowing it will pass in time. But it’s never fun. Thanks for reading.
Take care.
Love, Anne x

My Tips for Coping with Bad Health:

1. The time actually being treated is relatively small, so use the rest of your time well. The journey to the hospital can be a fun chance to sing loudly to favourite songs or chat to the person driving. The waiting room is a good place to read a novel, learn a foreign language, write shopping lists—whatever you want to spend time doing. Don’t just sit and wait, that’s very dreary.
2. The time not taken with medical stuff is yours—so don’t waste it with constant worry/talking about health. (Not easy!) Decide what you want to do, and focus on that. If I have lots of medical appointments, I try to fit them round the rest of life, rather than living life around medical stuff. Most appointments can be changed slightly to fit round other events.
3. Plan a little treat for afterwards—and remind yourself of it when you enter the treatment room. A cup of coffee and a cake, a bar of chocolate, a visit with a friend—something to look forward to.
4. Pray—whatever you believe, this is always good. (There are examples in the Bible of people praying for things they did not expect to receive—and they didn’t![1]—but it’s still a good principle, because you never know what might happen, plus it’s good to dump your worries/hopes/wishes somewhere.) I am praying to be healed of haemochromatosis, which would be a miracle because it can’t be ‘cured’. I’m not expecting this, and I certainly don’t deserve it, but there’s no harm with asking.

[1] 2 Sam.12:16-22.

As I am writing this in Italy, and as the rest of the world appears to be in rather a mess, I thought I would pass on some excellent advice that first appeared in a letter to some Italians. The translation is my own (from the Koine Greek) so apologies for any mistakes. Here is a code to live by, illustrated below with some photos of modern Italy (to add to the wonder). 

How to Live in a Crazy World

Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil, hold fast to what is good. Love each other with sibling affection. Outdo each other in showing respect.

Do not be lazy with enthusiasm, be fervent in spirit, serve God.

Be delighted in hope, be patient under pressure, continuing in prayer.

Give towards the needs of good people and strive to be kind to strangers.

Speak well of people who harass you—speak well of them and don’t wish them bad luck. Be joyful with those who are happy, cry with those who are sad. Live in harmony with each other. Do not be arrogant/smug, instead associate with poor/timid people. Never be wise in your own eyes.

Do not repay wrong for wrong, but think about what is good in everyone’s eyes. If possible, as much as you able, live in peace with everyone.

My friends, never look for revenge but leave it to God. It was written: ‘“Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says God.’ Instead, if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty give him something to drink (for doing this is like heaping coals on his head). 

Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good…

I was tempted to paraphrase some of it, to change the ‘burning coals’ bit to ‘this will make him ashamed’ but I decided to leave it as a translation and let you decide for yourself what it means in the context of the whole.

Thanks for reading.

Take care.

Love, Anne x