Richard's Ramblings

I’m not a very healthy eater, Leisa’s best efforts to reform me notwithstanding. Let me give you an example. You probably like apples as those crunchy, juicy round things you buy at Lamberts. While I like them as cider or, better still, Calvados. I am fond of  bananas, mind you.  As is Wendy Cope . But to get back to apples. My favourite form of apple is Apple, our house is teeming with them, a couple of iMacs, couple of iPads, couple of iPhones, an Apple TV, and assorted accessories. Bible compilers, in the Old Testament specifically, speak of “The apple of” (God’s usually) “eye.” Nowadays, in English, the phrase refers to someone or something which one cherishes above all others. We have Shakespeare to thank for this evolution of meaning. In Midsummer Night’s Dream, a fairy drops juice distilled from a flower which has been hit by Cupid’s arrow, into a sleeping young man’s eye, saying “Flower of this purple dye, / Hit with Cupid's archery, / Sink in apple of his eye”. Shake...

If you frequent a well-known social media site, you might have read that Leisa and I have bought only our second mattress since we moved to Australia, 25 years ago. That first one, from Forty Winks Nunawading who, along with IKEA, furnished (and still furnish) much of our home, was supposed to last 8, and certainly no more than 10, years. 25 years was pretty good going. The new one (Forty Winks Townsville Domain, we’re nothing if not loyal   😊   ) is 15cm or so deeper than our old friend.  Which introduces a problem for stooping-down-averse old geezers when I want to tie shoelaces from my usual edge-of-the- bed shoelace-tying station. So Leisa has moved a little folding step to my side of the bed, upon which I place (1) the sock and/or shoe which I want to wear, and (2) the foot which is to go into it. In Isaiah 61, God says that heaven is his throne and the earth is his footstool. Much hymnody portrays Jesus, God the Son, stooping down to this footstool earth to raise u...

We haven’t got round yet to watching one of our Christmas staple films, Love Actually. We shall! But we did watch A Christmas Carol on Sunday afternoon. More precisely, The Muppets Christmas Carol. I can’t imagine what Dickens would have made of it. Did you know that Dickens started a novel, or rather a magazine instalment, because that was how novelists of the time eventually produced the finished article, without having much of an idea of how it would end? You would think that a plot diagram would be an essential part of writing, but Dickens broke the rule and it doesn’t seem to have done him any harm. The real Christmas story is on the face of it a plot beginning. Except that when the Word became flesh, the story of salvation had already begun, outside of time. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” Our part in the story had ...

You’ve probably heard the term, Service of Closure, in the Uniting Church context. It doesn’t relate to catharsis for a traumatic experience – although it might, for some unfortunate people! It’s merely a church liturgy to mark the end of a ministry placement, the counterpoint to the original induction or commissioning. When I left the Wesley Hospital, the then General Manager (now CEO of the Mater, Townsville, small world) said that I was “Always singing or humming”. My chaplain colleagues, particularly our catholic chaplain with whom I shared an office, concurred. So did some of the nurse managers. I’m not sure that it was always a fond memory, it must have got on their nerves sometimes. But here’s the thing: I didn’t know that I was doing it. Fast forward to the past couple of weeks. Among the new sounds in my implanted left ear (“Oh no, he’s not still going on about his cochlear implant!”) has been a low humming. I identified it a few days ago – it’s me, humming to myself. I was mo...

  I’ve put a couple of Stable on the Streets stars either side of my rear number plate. The last time that I had anything on my car identifying me as a Christian, at Dayboro, I inherited magnetic signs from my predecessor which carried our service times. One fell off along a country lane, and rather than retrace my route to find it, I took off the other one, too, because it was inhibiting my driving habits. That is, I couldn’t shout at visiting Victorians for driving too slowly, or try to out-accelerate whoever was alongside me at traffic lights, while I sported signs declaring that Dayboro Uniting Church was a welcoming, family Christian community. When I first started driving, mumble mumble years ago, it was the custom for earnest young Christians to have a sticker in their back window, or on their bumper, declaring that Jesus Saves, or The Wages of Sin is Death, or, a few years later, the Fish symbol. I’m still wary of whoever is in front of me when I see that Fish, because my e...

Back from post-op sign-off by my ENT surgeon. Everything is fine, the wound has healed, stitches are self-dissolving, inside the ear canal is clear. Switch-on and activation of the external sound processor is tomorrow, Friday. Then my brain will receive sound from the left side for the first time for more than 25 years. It just has to learn how to understand it. That’s a 6 to 12 month job. But the best news from Dr Anderson was nothing directly to do with audiology, it was that I can wash my hair in the shower! I’ve been plugging the implanted ear with a wax plug and sporting a shower cap. 2½ weeks of unwashed hair. Eew. Meanwhile, my hearing-aid-assisted ear has been clogged up with wax. It’s a problem for hearing aid wearers, many of you will know. Although wax is a nuisance, it’s produced for all the right reasons, to protect the ear from a foreign intruder, in this case, the in-ear bit of the hearing aid. So I’ve been squirting anti-wax stuff into my ear for the past week, to loose...

I shouldn’t be sitting here at my Mac, promised the surgeon that I’d take it easy for a couple of weeks. But here I am, resplendent in a turban bandage covering Tuesday’s op wound, and unresplendent without a shirt so that my coronary artery bypass “zipper” is displayed for all to see. Except there’s only Leisa and the dog to see it. No pics, this is a family pew sheet. Ah, the dog. Yannie is our German Shepherd and she had a tumour cut out on Tuesday, the same day as my cochlear implant surgery. Poor Leisa had to toggle between the Mater, JCU Vet and working from home. Yannie is at my feet sporting a “cone of shame” to prevent her from licking her wound, and a couple of Leisa’s socks to prevent her from scratching it. We make a fine pair. I know why I look like a knife sharpening block, but Yannie doesn’t know why bits of her do. She just knows that her supposed carers took her to a disinfectant-smelling place where she gets jabbed every few months, but this time they went to town on ...