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Tag Archives: heart operation

Sanskrit Text, Silver Spoon and Leaves

1    Reading LouAnn’s blog about making resolutions for the New Year, I was reminded of this beautiful Sanskrit text which I found some 35 years ago when one of our twins was desperately ill and needing the first of three operations on his heart (coarctation of the aorta)    These words helped me get the best out of each day with him to make good memories of that very difficult time. He survived! He’s the D who was married in Senegal last April!

Look to this day
for it is life
the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all
the realities and truths of existence
the joy of growth
the splendour of action
the glory of power.
For yesterday is but a memory
And tomorrow is only a vision.
But today well lived
makes every yesterday a memory
of happiness
and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day….

It is still my philosophy today.

2   Grand-baby T needed cough medicine when she was here and I searched out the silver spoon we were always given medicine with. She wasn’t impressed!  The back of the spoon is marked ‘Practical Kiddicraft’

Silver medicine spoon

Silver medicine spoon

The back of the medicine spoon

3   Down the lane were these leaves. I love the contrast of the bright green new ones with the bronze of the old ones.

New leaves and old

New leaves and old

and something not at all beautiful but which I feel very strongly about and in her blog,  Anjig, of knitreadclick, not normally a political blog, examines the whole issue of the safety of women in India. Do go across and read. It’s not an easy read but a very important issue.

 

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Tourists in London 2 – Ephemeral Sand Art, ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ in Shona and Guy’s Hospital

Another day stomping around London, riding the underground and being glad we are just visitors and don’t have to travel like this every day!

1   At low tide there are occasional beaches on the Thames! We spotted this Frenchman creating a sand sculpture which would be gone in a few hours as the tide came back in.

Sand sculpture

2   I love The Globe! The matinee this afternoon, part of Globe to Globe: 37 Plays in 37 Languages at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, was ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ in Shona! The production was amazing, so funny and so clever! Just two remarkable actors played all eleven characters including the dog. We laughed so much our faces ached! Incredibly, it’s still only a fiver to be a Groundling as it was when it opened in 1997. We met two beautiful Zimbabwean women who were enjoying hearing a play they knew well in English in their mother tongue.

Skakespeare’s Globe

Waiting in the rain for the second half

Valerie and Chipo, Zimbabwean women in the audience

3   We walked to the tube via Southwark Cathedral with Guy’s Hospital in the background. Very mixed memories from 30+ years ago when Daniel was in Guy’s  for two of his three heart operations – one at 13 days in Leeds followed by two at Guy’s, one at 6 months and one at 30 months. The beautiful thing about this is that he survived against all the odds and is the beautiful young man who just got married in Senegal.

Southwark Cathedral and Guy’s Hospital

 

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