cake and Christmas

This week's joke has been vegan Turkey,  It's not often Kev the senior project manager and I agree.  Currently Tofurkey has made me smile and him rant!! Tofurkey..what a smile inducing name...I like vegetarian food but somehow it seems wrong to call it turkey??

We've had sporadic heating in the office and none (business as usual, poor blokes) in the factory and the bay doors all open. So cold.  They wear woolly hats and fingerless gloves. And moan.  The bosses don't seem to care or do anything - it's been like that for five years. Surely isn't legal.
So christmas chocolate biscuits from me lasted two days!  I know it's not December yet but this year, for the first time in ages, I am excited about Christmas. Maybe because I get a decent holiday break, maybe because at last I am in a permanent stable job - no pun intended. The work is slowing down and the piles of metal are ending up in the paint shop and turn into HSBC, Greggs and Jobcentre plus frontages. It is really interesting to walk through from metal shop to decal application to despatch. I try to ask questions - what are you doing, what does this do, what project is this (95 signs for crossrail, all screenprinted the same)

I don't like dark mornings.  Even back on medication.  I feel more together but still have to prise myself out of bed, and I am grateful that I am having to learn to be a little gentle because God and I don't talk much in winter - he talks I suspect I grunt!!!  But a lot of reading gets done.

I'm loving the Tom Wright on Paul book -see previous post.  It must have been like walking on a tightrope, trying to reconcile his Jewish background with the explosion of Jesus-the-messiah honouring faith into the gentile/pagan world.  How radical he was.  All those women he worked with, all the households where the faith must have played absolute havoc with the power structures and norms and cultural festivals and practices..

I'm trying to turn my house into a tidy place that feels warm and welcoming for advent - I need to save for a new boiler and I know I need more windows, so it's budget and candles to tart the place up.
Cheap gentle light...

Weird wild weather

I caught this morning's deluge full on, that will serve me right for reading Tom Wright for an hour!!  What an excellent book and no, shamefully I got it in hardback from Amazon....I know!  An excellent biography of Paul the apostle and less dense and obscure than the last book of Tom's I tried (and failed) to read.

It's a fabulous historical "who-dunnit" of a book, tracking the man, his mission, his character and putting him in context.  And the book smells beautiful - I truly love sniffing books, always the first thing to do with a new book.  Quality ink and paper smell delicious, particularly hardback.  How sad to admit that.

So today the river that is the flood relief channel is a torrent of milk chocolate, covering the posts and decking of the new little bridge and sweeping down towards the mill on the Exe.  I watched four-swans-a-struggling across the basin by the waterfront.  Such bulky birds but they looked graceless and harrassed.  And then my friend and I watched seven or eight coots paddling for all they are worth to avoid being swept back down into the weir.  Little earnest things, the swirly currents kept sucking them back into the flow and one of them just let go and let themself be carried along.

Writer's block?

I've had a couple of months off writing.  And I am not sure quite why.  Somehow I think I have hammered myself into the ground like a tent peg in sunbaked soil.  A phone call from a concerned friend gave me a few pointers to the load I'd been trying to balance on my fairly narrow shoulders.  I cried with relief!  So nice to be listened to!  So here are the months more fun things.  I got my 2 mile swim medal, decorated with orange autumn leaves and little pumpkins and a funky tangerine ribbon.  Yesterday I learned my muscle heavy frame means my legs sink when I swim - which is one reason for a dreadful crawl stroke!  So many lengths over a month...

Meeting a long lost college friend and her lovely wife, and laughing, talking and oh eating - particularly iceland's version of cheesy posh potatoes. So good to catch up on 35 years of life.  I think that being fed and being listened to are my recipe to happiness.  It doesn't take much.

Being told by the "boys" at work that they want me to come to the drinking/pool playing/large roast dinner eating affair that is the factory non official Christmas meal, and being told that as a non drinker (ish) I was very welcome. And buying a new Christmas tree to replace the one that looks like a disfunctional toilet brush!!!!  Talking of which, I will never be quite the same after hearing yesterday that occupational therapist friend used nutella to teach bottom wiping to children!  A "nice dollop of it on plastic" hmmm what if they eat it?????? Oh dear another good reason but I do like nutella.

Books - what am I going to do now that Tombland is the last Shardlake book as the excellent CJ Sansom is so ill with cancer?  It's a brick of a book, but slow steady reading is such a joy, and I knew absolutely nothing about Kett's rebellion.

So I have broken the writer's block at long last...