Watching the Wheels

Still sitting in Sheffield, return to Japan on hold for a week, it's hard to write anything insightful or coherent in face of the enormity of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear accident. The scenes are quite horrifying: it is difficult to imagine even a fraction of the distress, loss, grief and suffering of so many lives interrupted. We can only be thankful that so far no-one close to us—physically or emotionally—has been caught up in this (Kansai is 450 miles away from Sendai), and pray that this is as bad as it gets.

As I've noted so often in recent posts, because I'm made so acutely aware of it so frequently these days, life is phenomenally uncertain and fragile: worrying about how our children may or may not turn out, or cope, as adults is much less important than how we pass the time in between times; it may also turn out to be completely irrelevant. With that in mind, we drove out to Chatsworth and spent a gorgeous Spring day in beautiful surroundings. A happy distraction from the grim horror of explosions at nuclear plants, but no less real for all that. Time for more John Lennon, methinks...

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Turbulence (Thanks for all the fish, and more)

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What's love got to do with it?

Click here to play the first track [Youtube] When I was young/My father said Son, I have something to say And what he told me I'll never forget Until my dying day... ( Cliff Richard, Bachelor Boy, 1963) Since just after Justin's birth, I have tried to be positive and optimistic about our future, and particularly about the challenges presented by his condition. Sometimes, as will have been clear from other posts, this positivity is aided by an ostrich-like refusal to contemplate future eventualities, but mostly, it's because I feel we've been really lucky: he had no postnatal medical complications; he's loved and accepted by his brothers, he's growing well; there's even a hint of a smile on his face... There are some days, though, when optimism seems like an overwhelming challenge, days when I almost lose the will to move forward, and when I look around for a large tub of sand (something, like litter bins, that is in desperately short supply in u...

Devenish

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