Westward Ho!

Westward Ho! beach on 'dramatic' setting on my camera.

The girls love the sea, and I do too.

B photographing the sea and the surfers

L loves to paddle

One Beautiful Dream - Jennifer Fulwiler - Book Review

5 stars
This book is just brilliant. I read it in under 24 hours...I'm on holiday, so why not! It is both funny and moving.

I found it particularly moving because it answered inner questions I mull over often about decisions we have made as a family.

I love her thoughts about the 'blue flame' - the passion that ignites a fire within you. About 'wholeness of vision' - that we cannot control the now, but to see what our choices now will look like in the future. About the fear of asking for help because you don't want people to see your mess. The advice from Father George: "Where there is no unity, there is no God. God is always calling us to connection, to unity, and if we don't have that, we are not walking with God...We always think like individuals, like the work that we do has nothing to do with anyone else. God wants us to see what we do as just one small part of something greater..." These and other snippets have given me a lot to think about.

And the image of her climbing in and out of the car window due to a broken door was hilarious.

Well recommended.

How to be Free - Tom Hodgkinson - Book Review

2 stars

So wanted to like this. I have a fairly libertarian outlook and am rather suspicious of big government and the nanny state. I agree that there are so many stupid rules about this and that, these days, that we are all slaves to the machine (although I am in no way an anarchist, like he claims to be).

I totally agreed with his points about the unfairness of these huge companies who will chase you with threats if you are a day late with a payment but who feel it is OK to give you the runaround when they owe you money.

I too would love to avoid mortgage, pension, etc. But I really don't want to live in a commune or a squat.

I agree that the Puritans sucked a great deal of fun out of life [by banning Christmas, etc.] and wrecked a lot of beautiful religious art, etc...though I am not at all convinced by his obsession that if we had just all stayed Catholics then we would all just be such a happy bunch of peasants; nor by his constant claims that the medieval era was one of fairness and fun for all.

Some of his statements are just downright annoying. For example, his 'yay me for driving without insurance what a rebel I am'. No you're just an idiot with no concern about the poor person you might just crash into. And of course, every woman wants to get rid of her washing machine and instead wash her clothes in the river with all the other women (while the men are at the pub practicing their chivalry and dandy manners)! Yes we all like to wash laundry by hand whilst our husbands get drunk. Not. Oh and, apparently, even slaves could become freemen, so yay for slavery. Ah, the good old days...NOT!

And yes, I agree, big pharma are ripping us off (via the NHS) and we probably don't need to be as medicated as many of us are, however, I would suggest that developments in medicine and medical care has improved our lives greatly and we in England now don't often die in childbirth, from the flu, from an infection, from cholera, from smallpox...unlike the middle ages.

So, good premise, badly executed and spoiled by stupid statements.

So dry!

It's been so dry here for a while, which is unusual.  We live up in the Pennines and its main feature is drizzle, year-round drizzle.

But now the streams are drying up, the moorlands are suffering terrible fires and the wildlife are starting to suffer.

If you don't have a pond or any other water feature in your garden, in particularly hot and dry weather think about putting a bowl or tub of water out in your garden for passing wildlife and birds.

One very hot, dry year mum had a hedgehog drowned in her drain as it tried to get to water and got stuck facedown.

We put a shallow tub of water in the garden for any thirsty creatures and we've just had a frog wetting it's skin in the tub I put in the garden (with a stone added to help him hop out) being amphibians, they need to keep their skin moist.

Homemade salsa, plantain and curly fries

L has been cooking again...mmmmmm

The Heart of the Family - Elizabeth Goudge - Book Review

4 stars

This book is a lot more introspective than the other books in this series. It deals gently with the darker side of personality and experience. Because of this, it isn't an easy read. You have to really concentrate to follow the philosophical wonderings of each character, and so it isn't a book to read when you are tired. I kept having to re-read sections to grasp what was being said. Therefore, it isn't as 'enjoyable' but certainly worth it.

We need trees

So, my love of trees is two-fold.

1. God created trees to be the lungs of the world, we need them for life on this planet.
2. The writers of the scriptures regularly use trees as a metaphor represent the life of God in the Bible.

So here is an article from National Geographic, which contains a video that is just astounding:

The Earth has Lungs Watch them Breathe

First you see NASA's video showing carbon dioxide emissions, from various Western countries, swirling in the air.

But the moment June hits...

"That’s the month when trillions upon trillions of leaves are opening, growing, and starting to breathe, and what you will see in the video is their collective breath literally cleaning the sky. This video begins in January, but keep watching till we hit June (then July, then August). It’s like the world’s northern forests become a giant vacuum cleaner, scouring the air, sucking down the CO2 till around November."