Hot Summer Ramblings
I was talking to someone recently who's been in Crete on holiday. Apparently the temperature there was 35C (curiously I don't appear to have a degrees symbol on my keyboard). They came back to England, at 25C, and found it hot and muggy! This week, temperatures are forecast to continue to rise, with humidity remaining high. Ugh! Still, who needs sleep?
Blog City is testing my patience. A fair chunk of the time it just isn't available. If it is available then comments or posts either don't save at all, or save unbelievably slowly. And even when it works 'properly' there are still the aggrevations of having to sign in for every comment, and copy and paste not working in Firefox (with the stupid notice popping up when I forget, blaming Firefox even though every other website in the known universe and beyond lets you do this). Aagh! Now the preview function isn't working!
Some time ago The Capt posted a comment on my Alcohol Pricing entry raising some good questions which I thought were worth a full post of their own. That post bogged down, not helped by the Blog City aggro mentioned above. What I would say here is that alcohol is very much a double edged thing. I really enjoy good beer, I like good wine, and I used to enjoy good malt whiskey. I also enjoy going out for an evening with friends and/or family to a good pub. Yet I have seen far too many good people fall into deep trouble because of a dependence on alcohol. Mostly, it seems, because of a combination of habit with using alcohol to help cope with the pressures of their lives. Although that is likely a big oversimplification.
Mostly I take the "It's hard to be a woman" stuff with a fair-sized pinch of salt - there are all sorts of pressures and problems in being a man too. I'll make an exception for the menopause though. It looks like going through puberty all over again (but backwards, kind of), and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
On the subject of alcohol, I was pleased to see the Prince Of Wales pub, in the middle of Caversham, has reopened. I walked past on Saturday afternoon, and there seemed to be lots of people enjoying a drink in the sunshine (with cover available for when it threatened to rain).
Next Sunday morning I'm giving a talk at a little church in Sherfield-on-Loddon, down in Hampshire. The subject is 'Patience', so I'm really working from a position of weakness! If you live in that part of the world, do pop in to say hello. The service is from 10:30 to 11:30-ish, and the church is just off the A33: turning off at the roundabout to Sherfield-on-Loddon it is about 20 yards along on the left hand side.
Good to see you've stuck with giving your talks. I'm a firm believer that
there should be a give and take between clergy and the congregation
regarding how religion is used to overcome personal and social issues. How
did it go?
Hi Capt. The talk seemed to go quite well. People in the congregation said
nice things - although they might just be nice people, of course. I still
can't get my head properly around a full talk so I did a kind of 'hymn
sandwich': breaking it up into parts with songs in between, and trusting
the whole to God to make some sort of sense to the listeners. Hopefully it
was useful.