Today is a very blustery day in England.
I went to the dentist, but I went - in my Fiat Panda - by a country way over the hills. The distance is short but the time was long due to traffic and me getting lost for 20 minutes after the flood cum ford.
I would not have attempted to drive through it if I had known how deep it was, but it took me by surprise because I saw no signs and there several other cars coming towards me on a narrow road.
I read recently that just six inches of water can often prove too much, and this flood seemed to be about six inches deep. Even though I drove fairly slowly to avoid creating too much of a bow wave, towards the opposite shore I felt the car losing power and I started to panic. I was carried through, but like the children of Israel, I became immediately lost upon gaining the opposite bank.
When I got home I decided to have a coffee, as usual, but I clumsily flipped the basket from the moka machine and it rolled on the floor and under my kitchen units, because, as you know, I do not allow kicking strips to reside in my kitchen. After a quick look I realised I needed a torch, which, once retrieved, informed me that the component had rolled so far into the corner that it was almost nestled against the mouse trap, which is cocked complete with cheese so cannot be approached by groping fingers without risking injury.
When I fell of my bike and broke my left metacarpal, I discovered that hand injuries can be very complex and are, of course, very impactful in respect of normal daily activities. I was fixed up at the hand coordination unit in the hospital, where I had quite a few adventures and meaningful encounters. I was only a day patient though... thankfully. Not like my dad, who spent nearly a month in a different hospital, shuffled from ward to ward and ultimately ending up in a geriatric unit that was anyway deemed to be excessively specialised with respect to my father's needs, which by that time were minimal because my father - I thought - had decided it would be a good time to die. All the fight had gone out of the man, after nearly 98 years of keeping it all very tightly together with a stern will indeed. My dad was quite the character, but he was far too self-reliant to turn to the Word of God, which he said was mainly a matter of interpretation and thus unreliable.
I wonder how much this kind of seemingly reasonable and rational thinking has been cemented by the church, with the different denominations and infighting and mainly, I suppose, with the Catholic-Protestant issue that has been used very effectively to divide and rule. Social programming exercised with absolute finesse and exercised, it would seem, since very ancient times.
But Scripture must be fulfilled.
Because strait the gate, and narrow the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
Yes, I did remove the two is's. I love the King James and never mess with it as a rule, but in this case I think the recommended additions can be discarded for poetic ends. I suppose "strait" and "narrow" are almost synonymous, but perhaps strait refers to a momentary narrowing as in a passage, while narrow is such as to reference a single-file path winding up the hill, with thorns and brambles and wotnot.
