I’m currently trying to read “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time“, which is a curious experience. The narrator is an autistic boy, with all sorts of consequences for how the book progresses.
One of the manifestations of my autism is a lack of identity. I’ve often noticed a tendency in myself to adopt the mannerisms of a person I’m with. And this extends to picking up ideas of how to behave from books – with sometimes embarrassing consequences – I used to think that Gabriel Oak’s slavish devotion to Bathsheba Everdene (“Far from the Madding Crowd”) was an appropriate way to express romantic love …
When the character is like me (the real me, which I’ve managed to conceal for so many years), I feel that I’m becoming a caricature of myself. Nowadays, I tend to read novels in small chunks, so will probably manage to finish, but it’s hard going …
Journal
Our cat is missing. He disappeared a week and a day ago. We were out for most of the day, and thought that he’d be happier outside. When we returned, our main thought was that he would be there waiting for us, but he wasn’t.
This weekend, we distributed posters to some of the local shops. Yesterday, wife got a phone call. Someone had seen a cat, looking like ours, crossing the road bridge over the trunk road (do they still call them that?) which bypasses our town. He was headed towards a neighbouring town.
We spent an hour yesterday, looking and enquiring, but no sign …
Story
The bible study went ahead yesterday evening; we’re working through a course called Discipleship Explored. The readings come from the book of Philippians in the New Testament.
Trying, at the very start, to think through quite a difficult question – which the course raises, and perhaps tries to answer. I guess that now, in my fifties, I reckon that even how you formulate the question differs for different branches of Christianity. But one version is: how do I know that I am a Christian? Not a problem, if you define a Christian as, for example, someone who attends church. But if you incorporate into your definition ideas like ‘born again’, or ’saved’, then you may have to consider the possibility that, outwardly, you appear to be a Christian, but something inside is missing.
And when Jesus tells the parable of the sower (which I shan’t attempt to link to, but shouldn’t be difficult to find), he does imply that an individual can receive the word of God, but fail to reach fruition. Whereas, as the speaker on the DVD reiterated: what God starts, he finishes …
Thinking
So many places I could have been on Saturday, but in the event I had an ENT appointment at an unearthly hour, which determined that by mid morning I was in the centre of Edinburgh with time to spare. So I popped into an exhibition in the National Gallery on the Mound. It was entitled “The Discovery of Spain”, and subtitled “British Artists and Collectors: Goya to Picasso”. I must have missed part of it, because I got nowhere near Picasso, but I enjoyed references to Velazquez, Goya, and El Greco.
I met up with the rest of the family around lunchtime, and in the afternoon we watched Lickety Spit’s retelling of the story of the Hare and the Tortoise. As might be expected in these PC days, neither creature achieved outright victory.
In more competitive spirit in the evening, we took part in a quiz night – where I was somewhat annoyed when I was told that I would only get a half point for ‘the world wide web’ as the answer to ‘which modern method of communication was Tim Berners-Lee responsible for’. Apparently, the correct answer is ‘the internet’ …
[In fairness I should mention that the actual marking was being done by one of the other teams, and they quietly gave us the full point.]
Spoiler
This evening, I shall be participating in a bible study (hopefully). I don’t know what to expect (well, apart from the obvious) …
[What I didn't expect, and has happened: this evening's study has been cancelled.]
Journal