Well after much waiting and praying, the Hoggs have taken delivery of a beautiful baby girl, Annabelle Grace.  She is absolutely gorgeous and everyone here at ‘Life the Universe and Things in between’ (er… that’d be me then!)  would like to wish Al and George many congratulations, you will be superb parents and she is absolutely beautiful!

Last night we had a great evening of ‘ambient-lit’ poker at Jon and Sarah Sandys’ house (Sarah was away though sadly). We had never been to John and Sarah’s gaff, so I was particularly impressed, upon arrival, to observe that they live by ‘CASINO PLACE’!! How apt. Well, after some pizza, too many doritos and various other bits of food and wine, Texas Hold’em got underway. It was quite confusing and quite competitive, but a great laugh.

It soon became clear that not only does Kate Bird win at duck racing, but also at every other game!! The bank of Bird soon became a flourishing business as Kate swept in the chips and Keith was doing pretty well too…

As we left at a sleepy hour, the car battery died for about the 5th time this week. Last time was a little more drastic as it managed to die in that unique angle that can only be achieved by parking outside Cheltenham Sorting Office, which is stressful at the best of times! I prayed silently as JT and a random bloke pushed it into the Swindon Road and mercifully it started. We now have to consider buying JT a bike so that he can stop riding mine and I can stop using the car unless it is urgent!! Or we could buy a new car battery but not sure what the best option is at the moment.

I am “on tenterhooks”…  George is in labour!  To pass the time away (I am twitching a little) I decided to look up “tenterhooks”… What are they?!?

I found this…

It comes from one of the processes of making woollen cloth. After it had been woven, the cloth still contained oil from the fleece, mixed with dirt. It was cleaned in a fulling mill, but then it had to be dried carefully or it would shrink and crease. So the lengths of wet cloth were stretched on wooden frames, and left out in the open for some time. This allowed them to dry and straightened their weave. These frames were the tenters, and the tenter hooks were the metal hooks used to fix the cloth to the frame. At one time, it would have been common in manufacturing areas to see fields full of these frames (older English maps sometimes marked an area as a tenter-field). So it was not a huge leap of the imagination to think of somebody on tenterhooks as being in an state of anxious suspense, stretched like the cloth on the tenter. The tenters have gone, but the meaning has survived.

Tenter comes from the Latin tendere, to stretch, via a French intermediate. The word has been in the language since the fourteenth century, and on tenters soon after became a phrase meaning painful anxiety. The exact phrase on tenterhooks seems first to have been used by Tobias Smollett in Roderick Random in 1748.

The other day I got round to downloading Pete’s EP which is excellent.  I particularly like the track called ‘Infinity’, it has some really nice melodic progressions in it.  So if you read this blog, why not give it a download and have a listen?  In fact, download the whole EP, it is all great.

It is nice to be home and nice to be sitting on a sofa (a novelty after two weeks in fields!)   I am slowly washing my own body weight in clothes given that when I left for Shepton, the water was still off and I took all of my clean clothes with me!  I am also attempting to rest but my mind is full of ‘things that need to be done’ which are all quite pressing!!

New Wine was good, some excellent and challenging teaching by various people, one of my favourites being Baroness Cox, who was superb.  Plenty of time to socialise and get up to mischief (as you will realise from previous posts!) and plenty of time to ‘enjoy’ horrendous showers and toilets.  There were times when I would delight in the public conveniences of Tesco Shepton Mallet because they were so clean and spacious!  Now there’s a weird feeling…

Twinkle and Monty are glad to be home and are enjoying a morning in the garden!!

Over and out…  For now!

The other night my friend Peter (25) lost his fight with MS.  He was a hugely brave man, always sporting a smile and always loving the Lord  and trying to make others laugh throughout a lot of pain, frustration and ten years of illness.  Huge love to Bruce, Shelley, Heather, Mike, Chris and their families, I am desperately sad for you all.

I was praying about the whole situation, as ever since I became a Christian I have been praying for Pete to be healed (not with as much regularity as I should have) and he wasn’t healed, which is a hard thing to contemplate.  The Lord showed me that actually for Christians, entering heaven is the completion of healing and that for some people, who have had life, dignity and body stripped away from them, repair is not the best solution for them (even if it might be for us!)  The best place for Pete to be is in heaven with Jesus, with a new body, new eyes, his own comedy show and no wheelchair.

One thing is for sure… Pete never lost his dignity and certainly didn’t miss out on life!  Praise the Lord for that life.

Ok Nae… You challenged me to find some flag wavers – and here they are!!