Round here it looks as though the whole of the United Kingdom is gradually being covered in red white and blue in preparation for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Every garage forecourt seems to be selling flowers in these three colours , often petunias, I guess because they grow so quickly. The colours are, of course, those of the British flag, or should I say that of the United Kingdom.
Confused? You will be!
There are probably very few people who use this word in just the way we do as a family. Usually it means to move or cause to move rapidly up and down or from side to side, but we have a large garden from which we obtain lots of fruit, vegetables and herbs. I pack some in brine or syrup, make sauces, jams, and have even bought a dryer (not a clothes dryer) so that I can produce such things as semi-dried plums.
Rites of passage are what we call those times in all our lives which mark a transition from one way of living to another, a moving forward. They are different in different parts of society in different countries, and often dictated by religion – Jewish children for instance have their bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah in their early teens.
On Monday morning I found myself alone in a friend’s office just waiting. I couldn’t go through his files or use his computer. The view from the window is currently a pile of scaffolding and a tiny square of sky. Nothing to do. His fellow worker suggested that I make coffee and do something useful while I waited. On the desk was a newspaper, one I don’t usually read. It was open to an article about hospital chapels of all things– one very elaborate one in the Rather fussy Victorian style and the other a very ultra-modern minimalist room with imitation windows. It did however have what looked like comfortable chairs, rather than rigid upright pews with narrow seats.
I saw the modern room as flexible – you could have added things, made room for a wheelchair, used it for meetings of members of various faiths or none. A useful space.
“When I was just a little girl”, do you remember the song? It went, ‘When I was just a little girl I asked my mother what will I be?’ It is sometimes called ‘Que Sera sera’ and I think the singer was Doris Day. It is about a little girl asking her mother about the future ‘Will I be pretty, will I be rich? ‘
