Hear Our Silence

Not all internet encounters are welcome; but I had a good meeting this week with Carl McColman - ‘a bookseller by day, a blogger by night’, as he tells me.

I have recently delivered my sequel to Sounding the Silence. It will appear from Gracewing with a spread of Carthusian titles, Tom Longford, my publisher tells me. It’s always a strange moment letting go of your MS: you have lived with this task for many months and now you must let go. A bit like one of those party balloons full of helium, it floats up and away and is no longer part of you.

I cranked myself up and am now engaged on my next project, a commentary of my Julian of Norwich translation, Revelation of Love. And this is where Carl appears…at the end of one morning’s work, I idly Googled Julian only to discover that Carl has given her a page on My Space. And neatly done it is too - the good lady would be proud.

Carl’s own Blog leads you to it:

www.anamchara.com

I don’t think I have told you about my great neices, Molly and Ella. I think that makes them your second cousins…

And they are your age Julia: and they are twins! They live in Sheffield near their mother, my sister and here they are in Clumber Park last week…

We always think twins are dressed alike and exactly the mirror image each of the other. But Molly is not Ella: and Ella doesn’t wish to be anything like Molly. But they are good friends.

At school they are in separate classes with different teachers. Last week they had their STATS, a strange test exam that the Labour government has decreed to check how every person is performing in their school.

It is quite complicated with lots of questions about how good you are at reading and sums and thinking straight - or crooked….

Would you believe it: Molly and Ella both scored exactly the same marks in every single category.

Twins seem to be twins although they are different people.

Ceci and Julia will fly to Devon very soon. If you went to Hogwarts you could have flown over on your broomsticks, but that sounds a bit dangerous….

See you both very soon.

If you want to talk to Molly & Ella I cd email you their address…

Forget about mud and the festival: the abbey ruins of Glastonbury have a peaceful aura all of their own. We look forward to our weekend workshop at Abbey House, situated in the abbey grounds and overlooking the ancient monastery’s remains.

So far twelve people have booked - so we have rooms for a handful more.

Details from : wordman@HearourSilence.com

It would be great to welcome you to our workshop, an opportunity to experience the Prayer of Silence and explore together what this means for us as a group.

A friend of mine left this week for Zimbabwe, a brave man sailing knowingly into the eye of the storm. David Everitt was a well-loved priest in the Nottingham diocese; but parish life didn’t satisfy his deeper needs. So now David is spending the next six months helping out in a leper settlement run by the Mother of Peace community in Mutoko.

The news from that benighted country grows worse by the day. Hyper-inflation, children dying of malnutrition in hospital, the shops full of goods that no one can afford to buy, essential foodstuffs either bought up in panic buying or simply not visible on the shelves. The streets are deserted: there is no petrol and few can afford the fare to board a bus. A report in The Guardian quoted the superintendent of grave-diggers in Bulawayo (Zim’s second largest city): ‘we used to bury two people a day, now it’s up to 10 - we had to hire more diggers.’ Outside the city, crowds scavenge across an open waste site, scratching around to find any scraps of food on which to survive.

Visiting my sister in Worksop, I learn that my nephew, Greg, has won his wager. A year ago, he reported back to his Mum from San Francisco that he had acquired a bulldog. And in order to support his British roots, he was to be named Nelson.

A friend teased him that he would never coach the dog to skateboard - Tyson pictured above is the star of this American craze. Greg sealed a substantial bet which he recently redeemed in style.

The U Tube clip below bears proof. Has Tyson ever crossed the Golden Gate on his board?

‘England expects…’