The BBC story of actor Michael Sheen’s concern for children in care in his native Wales recalled the story at the end of last year that he had made himself a ‘not for profit’ actor. He had sold his houses and given away his money because he could always earn more money.
There is a stanza of a Creedence Clearwater Revival song Proud Mary that always intrigued me:
…If you come down to the river
Bet you gonna find some people who live
You don’t have to worry ’cause you
My late father’s desktop computer still works well, or well enough for me, anyway. Email and a search engine are all I require. He used to pass his afternoons watching black and white war films and Westerns on YouTube. Perhaps it is regress rather than progress, but I prefer to pass time reading books.
His keyboard password is always troubling, ‘sea vixen.’ He worked any many planes over the years, why did he choose the Sea Vixen for his password? Did the aircraft linger much longer in his memory than …
Albert Luxton was my mother’s maternal grandfather. He was a man who would have been delighted to have returned to England for the queen’s jubilee for he missed the opportunity in his own times.
The Roll of Honour website gives brief details of a man who now only appears in family photographs:
…Served and returned. Born 1881, in Aller, Langport, Somerset. Attested 29 July 1899 at Taunton, aged 18 years 8 months, served as Private 3313, 15th Hussars. Labourer before enlisting. Unmarried. Height 5 feet 5 inches, weight 116lbs, chest
Sitting on a bench in a little square in a side street in Lyon, I watched my Sunday morning companions. Some sat in twos and threes and chatted in the pleasant warmth of the spring sun. One man stared fixedly into the middle distance, as if in a trance. He dod not move for half an hour.
A lady in her mid-nineties once told me with a sense of perplexity that a friend had told her that they could easily sit on a bench for an hour and watch the …
“The devil makes work for idle hands,” was one of the maxims that governed my life in childhood years.
Not being a religious family, the devil was of little concern, but idle hands were a more serious matter. There was always a feeling of a need to be doing something, always a need to feel that times was being wisely spent. Perhaps it was logical, if time is the greatest gift in the universe, then to sit and do nothing is surely to waste it?
But might not the reverse …
‘Now, I would advise you to go home and to sleep for as long as possible. Take some paracetamol and try to go to sleep, it will be the best way to deal with the pain.’
Feeling that I had been punched repeatedly in both sides of the face, I went to the reception.
The smiling young woman looked up. ‘Now for the painful part,’ she said, ‘for today it will be €1600.’
I took out my debit card. ‘And for the next part it will be €1800?’
‘It will. …
