Saturday 5 February 2022

Winter sports. Cooking to beat gloomy weather. Reading to beat addiction.

Fireworks in China yesterday - Winter Olympics and meetings of presidents. We’ll see how all that goes.


Sometimes I wonder why we bother to take part in the Winter Olympics at all. Maybe we should stick to skating events. After all, we can manage to practice ice skating stuff as we do have ice rinks. But anything involving skis is more problematical. I heard of one skier who went off to practise cross country skiing in Norway, I think. There really isn’t anywhere here where you need to, or indeed can, do cross country skiing. 


Listening to Any Questions on Radio 4 I heard a Northern Ireland politician express her longing for someone to explain to her the benefits of Brexit to Northern Ireland. Well, yes, I could echo that for the rest of the United Kingdom! We’ll see how that goes as well.


It’s another wet and gloomy day. This morning I cheated the weather once again, managing to time my run so that it fell onto a dry spell. It was cold and windy but the sleety rain didn’t start until I was almost home. In the time it took me to shower and sort myself out the wet stuff set in with a vengeance and looks as though it’s here to stay. 


My eldest granddaughter tells us she is cheering her dull day up by making chocolate cakes. A day or so ago it was ginger cakes. She shares much of her life on our family’s joint messaging link. Much of what she has to say concerns the odd actions of her friend and housemate. Yesterday she treated us to the odd fact that her friend wipes the dishes with kitchen roll before washing them “so that she won’t make the washing up brush dirty”!! Isn’t that the purpose of a washing up brush? Then we had her eating bun cases along with the buns “because that’s where the tastiest cake mix gets stuck”. Okay! Today it was the problem of coming in from an errand and heading straight upstairs, leaving the front door wide open! Fortunately their little street is set back from the main road and doesn’t have casual passers-by who might pop in and steal all their electronics! Between complaints and crises, I think I may need to put it all together in a book.


I was reading this article about a writer called David Sanchez who explains how reading helped him beat drug addiction. I was struck by this at the start of his closing paragraph:


“In the past few months, I have turned 30 and celebrated 10 years of sobriety. My life is richer and deeper than those few miserable years when I was younger. In my day-to-day existence, I don’t think much about them, and even when I was writing a book that was born from these experiences.”


I find myself astounded that at the relatively tender age of 30 (which seems quite old and grown-up when you are actually 30 but is really very young in whole life terms) he is able to talk, with pride, of celebrating 10 years of sobriety!


Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

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