A bit of sunshine and a bit of madness!

We have had a day of blue sky and sunshine here. It’s about time. I thought yesterday was going to be one of those days but after a promising start it rapidly went downhill. Today, however, the blue sky managed to remain all day. Excellent!

And so I went off and met our daughter for a stroll around. We visited the library and acquired a library card for the smallest member of the family. The children’s room at the local branch is quite impressive: boxes of small-child-appropriate books all nicely accessible for small people to look at them, paper and crayons for those who wantp to scribble and on the higher shelves a nice range of books for older children. All good stuff.

We went on to play on the swings - the smallest member of the family, that is - visit a toyshop to look for a present for the second smallest who is going to be four before long and finally we went to have coffee and a snack, later joined by Phil at the end of a walk and one of the teenage grandchildren at the end of her school week. A most satisfactory Friday.

Over in France madness seems to have been rife. Shopper have been fighting each other, fists have been flying, shelves have been emptied, but only of one product. A supermarket chain put out a special offer, reducing the price of jars of Nutella by 70% and the French went crazy to buy as much as possible.Now, I am sure that Nutella is very nice, if you like that kind of thing. Personally I can take it or leave it. Too much gets a little cloying, in my humble opinion. But then I am clearly not as sophisticated in my taste as the French. I can think of nothing that I would get into fisticuffs over in an attempt to buy it.

Has anyone looked at the sugar content of Nutella?

Here’s another story of a bit of foreign madness. A photographer called Lauren Pond has published a book called “Test of Faith, Signs, Serpents, Salvation”. It chronicles the time she spent with the “sign followers”. These are people who take literally a passage from the Gospel of Mark in the King James Bible: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”

These believers handle venomous snakes during their services, confident that should they be bitten the Lord will protect them. Unfortunately, one of their pastors was bitten by one of his snakes, Old Yeller, and died. This is not the first time this has happened either. Oops!

In the TV series “Justified” there is an incident just like that. When we watched it, we thought it had been invented for the series. Apparently not!

Who would have thought that in the 21st century in a country like the United States people could still really believe such stuff? Do they also cast out devils and burn witches?

It makes me quite relieved that we just have the madness of Brexit to deal with.