Food and Family; labyrinthitis and reading

It's been a week of great meals out: fantastic pub lunch with clergy at the Stone Ferry Inn Thursday; great fish boona from the Rajah of Kent yesterday; and today a slightly belated birthday lunch with Mum and Charlie and families at Raffles in Cranbrook. Each day I've really been unable to eat a third meal; shameful really.Kate, Luke, and Ellie joined us back at Charlie's house and it was a pleasure to be with them too.

The week stated badly with labyrinthitis really kicking back in - linked as usual to some poor nights' sleep - but, better rested, I now feel 200 times better and almost symptom-free. I have a hope maybe this is the final fling of it but I can't tell. It's five months since I was hospitalised with it so I reckon, on average, I'm about due to be well again.

One pleasure of our week in Suffolk was catching up with David and Gillian Shacklock in Debenham - a very fine lunch in a very fine house, enjoying our coffee in the gallery that has been there since it allowed spectators to watch Shakespeare and the Kings Men perform in the courtyard below. Better still, it is a house with a built in secondhand bookshop which David presides over. I remembered he collected works by Sabine Baring Gould but didn't think I'd buy one until I found SBG's "The Vicar of Morwenstow". Anne and I visited Morwenstow once on a sunny day off when Tom and Claire were tiny and picnicked on the hillside overlooking the church and the Vicarage with its eccentric chimneys (each is built in the miniature of the church towers where Harker the Vicar had ministered). Anyway, the book is highly entertaining and has many anecdotes which we enjoy for their Victorian humour, clerical eccentricity, and Cornishness. Great bedtime stuff.

 And today I took delivery of 'Jesus and Politics' by Alan Storkey. Those who appreciate the work of AS know the kind of treat I am in for - to my shame I didn't know he'd written it - it came out in 2005 just when I dropped out of paid ministry for my 'self-funded sabbatical' on the RHDR. Read the first 40 pp tonight: well worth it for the background material on Herod alone.

Talking of books I spent much of Friday sorting (and clearing) out books at New Romney ready to reintegrate the library from Bethersden. Found many old friends - including Edersheim's 'Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah' which AS quotes - and also 'Eeyore's Little Book of Gloom' from which I quote to close:

Sharpen your Bluntness:
"I've got a sort of idea," said Pooh at last, "but I don't suppose it's a very good one"
"I don't suppose it is either," said Eeyore