Tell It Like It Is

Musing on ‘Tell it like it is’. When does an idiom becomes a cliché?

Yesterday ‘telling it like it is’ included ‘no covid-related deaths’, ‘seaside businesses doing well in the good weather’ and, ‘should we delay the final June 21^st lifting of Covid-restrictions?’ Apparently ‘We should delay June 21^st’… to mid-August?’ Would we jump from 20^th to 22^nd?!

‘Telling it like it is’ yesterday….

Pictures of Kerry and Julian. It’s 25 years since they got married. They celebrated at ‘Africa Alive’, a local wildlife park, where they first met. We remembered their wedding, their first home, children growing up… the good, the bad and occasionally the ugly.

The trial of the Ipswich teenager who shot another lad on his way to school last September continues. The injured boy’s mother gave evidence… hearing the shot, finding her son, stemming the flow of blood, seeing the accused lad holding a gun… her screams, thoughts and feelings.

Naomi Osaka, the world Number 2 tennis player, didn’t do a post-match interview in the French Open on Sunday to ‘protect her mental health’; she’s been suffering with ‘bouts of depression’. Following a fine and threatened with expulsion, Osaka pulled out of the tournament and will ‘take some time away from the court now’.

I had a phone call from Ruth. Life at home is difficult as her husband Geoff often shouts at her and the children. She told of her anxieties and fears, his past problems and present anger. Geoff was listening to the conversation as we discussed possible ways forward…

Job said: ‘I will not keep silent. I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul’. (7:11)

I tend to bottle it in or understate it; Job ‘told it like it is’ to his ‘friends’ and his God. Mum used to say, ‘It’s better out than in’… in a variety of contexts…