It’s the start of December, and 2022 is not yet over. But it’s time to write another newsletter filled with all the exciting things we have done this year. Unfortunately, we don’t have too many of those, so we must go with what we have.
What a relief not to be walking around with those smelly
self-infecting elasticated face pads mandated over the last couple of years!
What a relief that, slowly, we are getting a handle on what has been going on
around the world. How many people in authority have been found to have made
uninformed decisions perhaps because they were afraid of appearing to do
nothing. A conversation with a friend who lives near Cardigan on the Welsh
coast, revealed that, last year, for a time, he could not go for a walk with
his wife along the sea front because the council had closed the carpark ‘to
stop the spread of Covid’.
Enough of that topic; we hope we are starting to see the
back of it.
Our year has fallen into quite a regular pattern with
meeting with friends from our church one of the mainstays. Several times a week
friends drop in for a cuppa and a chat, and about every couple of weeks an
elderly neighbour from across the road joins us on our weekly Aldi top-up trip.
We don’t need to tell anyone about rising prices, but perhaps the vicissitudes
of life we have experienced in the past help us to be economical now. We see
grocery prices rising weekly but not the 100% we have noticed in other stores
we browse.
In the last newsletter we said how five dear friends had
died. The figure for this year has been seven, but what a joy to know that
though they have passed on, it is to Glory rather than to Judgement. The
increasing chaos in the world flows plainly from the abandonment of God and the
embracing of humanism and evolution, both such irrational ideologies when a
loving God has demonstrated that He has removed us from judgement if we chose
to commit ourselves completely to His loving care. The ‘good news’ is freely
available yet continuously rejected by the world.
Zoom runs on with a valuable Cross family linkup every
Sunday fortnight. We have met up with Ben and Louise, who live in Swindon, at
irregular intervals during the year, and Tim has dropped by one evening a week
to refuel. Tim enjoys his own home near M4 Jn 11 where he continues to overwork
for National Grid and Ben still overworks for Dell.
The travel industry having become marbleised over the last
two years, overseas holiday spots have lost their attraction and we have failed
to arrange a full holiday anywhere in the UK. However, we visited Paul (Mike’s
frรจre)
and Carol in Aylsham, Norfolk during June and October, and Terry and Fran, Alec
and Angela around Hastings in September. Until the National Trust manages to
burn down or rewild their properties, and drape them all with rainbow ribbons,
we have thoroughly enjoyed what previous generations have ground the faces of
the poor to build in the way of glorious estates.
When, in 2016, we converted much of the ground floor of our
semi into more gracious living accommodation (who does he think he is?), we
lost the use of the integral garage for storing spare bedding and the (unused)
exercise bike. Accordingly, we converted the front bedroom upstairs into a
replacement garage store room which has been highly successful.
We still have a spare double bedroom at the back of the house and
have enjoyed a number of visitors over the year. About three nights is our
maximum before we begin to flag. My brother summarised it with the words “Its
so nice when you come; its so nice when you go”. In our earlier years we
often had visitors to stay, but something has changed… our energy levels we
think.
The summer was hot for a few days (though no more extreme
than we remember in the past) and we enjoyed our garden, attempting to look
like gardeners for a few days, but having to retreat into the house and the
relief of a portable air conditioner when temperatures really rose. It seems to
be either too cold, or too wet, or too hot to do too much in the garden. Or are
we picky? We pride ourselves on keeping British garden centres around Reading
in business by checking on coffee quality at regular intervals, and buying
dying plants at rock-bottom prices so that we can continue with a good
conscience whether we rejuvenate them or kill them (the odds being 50% for either).
Throughout the year we have continued to cut starchy foods
and most sugar out of our diet for health reasons, Janet doing sterling
servicing driving the chuckwagon into unknown territory, and our weight has
been maintained at a respectable level, though still higher than we would like.
According to a learned article on a medical website, all diets plateau in the
end, so we suppose that, unless something revolutionary happens to our diet,
that is as far as we can go. But we will persist.
Friday mornings, Janet persists with a ‘Community Bible
Study’ at Wycliffe Baptist Church, and enjoys the content, and contact with a wide
cross-section of ladies. This is an opportunity for Mike to escape and go for a
walk or coffee with a male friend of which there are a number to choose from.
However, he can be a stick-in-the mud, like most older males and needs
encouragement. Getting older is a funny business, isn’t it? The way forward is
to bring everything to God. Which should be a joy.
We send you much love, and if you should feel to update us with your own news, we should be most grateful. “As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.” (Proverbs 25:25)
