Devenish

It's Justin's birthday tomorrow, and this post will be developed to reflect and celebrate this anniversary, so much better than we could have anticipated just under a year ago when we were first told of his condition. Meantime, for various reasons I have had cause to think of birthdays towards the end of life, as well as the beginning, and of the consolations of age and experience ( The Autumn leaves have got you thinkin', about the first time that you fell... ). Physically, there are precious few of these, perhaps none: there is no upside of the loss of health and vitality. Intellectually and emotionally, things are not much better: growing old sucks, and pandering talk of greater wisdom and broadening perspective is just so much pap to help us keep down the bile of wasted time .

About 40-odd years ago, when I was little older than Sean is now, I took part in my first school play at Campbell, an English adaptation of Max Frisch's ,Biedermann und die Brandstifter' (The Fire Raisers. I was in the chorus, dressed as a fireman, and the shortest by a long way. My parents only identified me under an oversized helmet about half-way through the play, and then started to worry about my height). By coincidence—or perhaps not, it may be a perennial favourite among school drama teachers—it is the current school production running at Canadian Academy on Rokko Island, where we all go on Sundays for Sean and Julian to play football, and where I puff around a 5km running path with some of the other fathers. I was reminded of this last night, when Sean appeared on local tv and in the evening paper (see below), setting fire to stuff inside a public building.

There are many versions of what Mark Twain is supposed to have written concerning the misreporting of his demise, but this [left] appears to be the most authentic "The report of my death was an exaggeration." Less deadpan (!) are the words of the 'corpse' in this clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: " I'm not dead yet. " Words of hope. And so it is with Devenish. In spite of the trials and time pressures we experience as a family—like everyone else—we have a duty to look on the bright side and where possible to celebrate what is positive as well as to give time to problems, without being overwhelmed by them.