A whole host of gremlins got into the Anna M's electrics over the winter, and the new fridge finally arrived, so there was much to be done, involving burrowing in awkward corners, while I myself was full of aches and coughs. I think I caught something from an old boy coughing all over the bus that brought us up from Vila Real, and was generally feeling ineffectual. Meanwhile the locals were delighted on account of some rain. In the circumstances there was nothing to be done but tie up to the pontoon in Sanlucar and see what the bit of extra convenience and human company might do.
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| Julian coming along the pontoon with Lily. |
The sun was soon getting strong, I was feeling a lot better, and blow me if the Lord did not (after my smart remarks last week) send a wonderful Englishman to sort me out. With his Irish wife Martina and their second daughter Katy, they live on Carina of Devon*, to be seen in the left of the photo. With Julian's help those gremlins are on the run.
Rogan Wolf whom we visited in Clifton gave us a poem -‘A dotted line/ is like a prison window;/ between the bars infinity beckons.’ ‘... if I chanced/ upon infinity,/ would I ride it/ or just fall?’ Certainly not 'just fall', Rogan, but I'm not sure if 'riding' it is quite the right word for the alternative. And how does infinity beckon? When the sun comes out after the rain, the swallows are full of joy, the hills a riot of flowers, the nights a competition of crickets' song and nightingales', well, all this is a good start. Yet it is easy to miss.
Tom Jackson in his book on Darwin, subtitled The Poet Who Died, recounts how as the young man of the Beagle Journal ('surely to be numbered among the greatest travel writings in English') the great man was full of poetry and passion, 'unutterably thrilled by his wonderful experiences'; yet by his own account, in middle age all this deserted him. 'The state of mind which grand scenes formerly excited in me, and which was intimately connected with a belief in God, did not essentially differ from that which is often called the sense of sublimity.' Well, whatever it was, he lost it!
Our loving Creator works especially by way of the gaps, and uses them to gain access to us. But while He is indeed God of the gaps, the world does its best to ignore them. Poor old Darwin and his many followers want to stay on the solid ground of ‘science’, and Tom shows how he covered over the gaps with a lot of half-baked ideology about 'Natural Selection' and so on. Happily nowadays one gets the impression that even science is being forced to recognise the gaps.
Julian and Martina are scientists too, yet evidently seeking those 'gaps' here on the river. If perhaps not 'ride', what then shall we say, Rogan? 'Go with the flow'? Swim, sail, fly.... Here is Martina out walking the riverside path:
and here is Fiona on the same walk:
and here are more flowers along the way:
*see Martina's blog, just discovered and highly recommended - https://carinaofdevon.wordpress.com/
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I welcome feedback.... Joe