All Manner of Things Shall be Well!

(My title this week is from the 15th century mystic Julian of Norwich.)

After last week's achievements (which included passing on the book about Julian of Norwich), the upward trend to my life has continued.  My floors, for example, look - and somehow feel - clean since the arrival of the new 'toy'.  It's absolutely amazing the volume it can suck out of a carpet and, it being bag-less and with a transparent storage body, I can see just how much unseen detritus I've been living on top of!

The highlight of the week was the day-trip to St Helen's on Wednesday.  In some ways it felt like being at work again, with lots of googling preliminaries, getting familiar with how the target area looks, deciding the best approach, and so on.  Twenty-four of us made this pilgrimage, in varying vehicular combinations and, I suspect, with a similar spread of motivation.  Some went just for the experience, some to see exactly what would happen, some to honour the past and others to join in pledging the future.  The occasion was the induction, installation and licensing of our former vicars into their new posts.

Although not the first such ceremony I've attended, it was the first time I'd been to 'an away event', my previous experiences having been limited to welcoming a new priest into my own church.  We are a church with bell-ringers but no bells; it's a pipe-dream for me that one day that we would join with the ringers of another place to celebrate together the movement of a priest from our parish to theirs.  Such a project was a non-starter in this instance because, like our church, St Nicholas, Sutton has only the one bell (although from its sound it's much bigger than ours!).

During their seven-year ministry with us in Letchworth, strong feelings have grown between our former vicars and ourselves, bonds of affection that will not be easily cast aside.  It was a poignant moment when, hearing them praying for the people they will now be serving, I realised that a new era has now begun for them.  Once the Church of England's strange processes have worked their course a similar new era will begin for us; for our part we can now feel that, in reality, that process has begun.

But the week has contained other high spots for me, too.  One of my regular morning prayer guides this week featured the work of the organisation in Wales and the introduction was written in both English and Welsh.  I was pleased that I could now with some fluency read the Welsh version and, although many of the words themselves are beyond the vocabulary I've so far acquired, I could follow the sentence structure and syntax of the whole piece.  It's an encouragement to persevere, and echoes a fact that I've noticed more and more lately, that 'England-and-Wales' is indeed a country with two languages and not just one.

About eighteen months ago, following a heavy cold, I realised that I had a problem with my nose that had not thereunto been the case.  Successive months saw numerous visits to doctors and specialists to determine what the problem was, and what might be the remedy.  Earlier this year I was led to believe that it was a further, if unwelcome, development of my asthma and that I should just have to live with it.  In recent weeks, I've become increasingly frustrated by the prospect of living the rest of my life with broken sleep, feeling tired, and so on, and yesterday I took time out to investigate further, using the wonders of the internet.

I found a forum on which were several posts describing symptoms and experiences the same as mine, and a number of medical responses, including references to remedies that I'd been prescribed during the past year and more.  I came to the conclusion that there could be a better, and simpler, way forward than the one I have been following.

At the same time, I recalled a small item that I had, tucked away in a kitchen drawer.  I have no idea how it came to be there and - until now - no idea precisely what it was for.  It bears the name Rovipharm and I now learn, from the same trusty internet, that it is indeed a medical syringe and comes from eastern France, near Lyon.  This little device certainly meets well the use to which I put it last night, for a saline douche, as a result of which I had the best night's sleep for months.  It was not uninterrupted, but a in a different league so far as satisfaction is concerned!