From Survival to Celebration

Yesterday…

Reading… Captain Howard Reid, betrayed and recaptured by the Germans in Italy, in 1943, played ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold’…

I didn’t recognise the phrase… Mr Google says it’s Shakespeare – King Lear.

…Edgar, Gloucester’s son and heir, is cast out from his family by his half-brother Edmund’s scheming. He disguises himself as ‘Poor Tom’, a destitute mad beggar. Nearly naked in a violent storm, Edgar’s line ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold’ portrays his suffering and vulnerability. He’s the victim of harsh injustice, but he must survive.

To survive, Howard Reid took on the role of a ‘good-natured, stupid, slightly fatuous British officer’ – ‘Poor Tom’.

Rathlin, an island off the coast of Ireland, was in the news. Rats are thought to have travelled to the island on boats in the nineteenth century; ferrets were introduced to the island in the 1980s to control the rats. However… the ferrets started to destroy the colonies of seabirds on the island

More than 400 traps were laid across the island to trap ferrets and rats. Woody, a labrador specially trained to detect ferrets was set to work… The island’s celebrating: since 2023 the island has been ferret free. Seabirds aren’t just surviving; the numbers are growing.

Rebecca wrote, celebrating her fifth anniversary:

‘…17th February 2021 I joined a 12 Step recovery program for food addiction… on 23rd March 2021 I let go of a lifelong battle with trying to control my food intake in my own strength and let God do what I never could in a million years.

Today, I am so intensely grateful for 5 years of eating the food my body needs, rather than the food my brain craves. I spent 40 years praying to be magically thin…

(God) has given me a very precious gift of relief from food obsession, one day at a time. If God can do that for this lifelong food addict, He can do anything!’

Edgar and Ian just need to survive. Moving from survival to celebration? Rathlin needed traps and Woody… Rebecca credits her God…