44. On Social Media, Problems with Pancakes and Minor Miracles.

Dearly Beloved,

People complain about social media but Whatsapp has performed a wonderful role keeping our family in touch as we send messages to one another daily on our phones. On the evening of Shrove Tuesday all the branches of the family were making pancakes. Our supermarket had supplied us with buckwheat flower by mistake which contains no gluten with the result that the pancakes did not stick together properly.  Our daughter in law reported that her mixture had fermented into a bubbly mass but that they had ignored that and gone on and cooked them anyway and reported “no ill effects so far”. I quite like pancakes made from fermented mixture as it is the equivalent of pancake sour dough. Our youngest son reported that the flour he used was full of mites which evoked the advice to treat it as added protein. It also reminded me and my my wife Josephine that when we first lived in Oman together after our marriage we had problems with mites too and Josephine solved it by filtering the flour through her tights.

The family is gathering in Cambridge for the half-marathon this Saturday but yesterday our eldest son tested positive for Covid and cousins who were coming to stay reported a child with chicken pox and our youngest son sent a horror picture of his swollen and very sore tonsils. Consequently people are not coming to stay with us so we do not become infected with shingles and various viruses, so everything has to be rearranged. Doubtless many families are using Whatsapp and similar applications to pass similar humorous messages of support to one another.

Another piece of family news is totally different. On Sunday I wrote a Dearly Beloved letter about my parents in war time (see DB letter no 24). The effect of writing this letter and producing the photograph resulted in a minor miracle. That was because my mother had died of an Alzheimer's like condition, gradually deteriorating over a period of about three years. I found observing that deterioration so traumatic that I could no longer remember her before the disease set in but only in a demented and anxious state. Having written the DB letter and selected and re-photographed ancient photographs as attachments, I discovered that memories of my mother before the illness had returned. That seemed to stem from an initial memory, from when I was almost five years old. The memory was of her pointing out the ships on the Mediterranean sea as we flew out to join my father whose Royal Naval ship was lying in Sliema Creek in Malta. That memory seemed to stimulate the re-emergence of a multitude of other positive, loving memories of my mother.

So when I go to St Clement's today, Ash Wednesday, it will not only be to have ashes put on my forehead but also to give special thanks for a small but lovely miracle of the return of my mother to me.

Peace and Grace to you all,

Paul.

Completed: 2nd March 2022.

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Virgin with the Dragon Fly, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528),.

The Dragon Fly is to be seen at the extreme bottom right of the engraving.


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