early Christmas lunch ...

Since the ladies of Edmundbyers W.I. , led by the remarkable Flora Hodgson, take a break in December from their monthly community lunch at Blanchland Social Club, yesterday was Christmas dinner for 60, plus raffle and entertainment from a dubious duo, one from Newcastle the other from North Northumberland, running through well worn jokes and songs, to the general amusement of the audience not conditioned to political correctness ... three busloads were collected door to door in Weardale for the occasion on a damp and blustery day ...heatwarming work and demonstrating the value of spending some time being useful to others ... though there may be room for debate on whether it is being useful or just feeling useful that works ... ah well no need to overthink such things, the overall response was wonderful ...

Current reading material includes Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, with some gruesome detail on the fate of heretics in the days of Henry V111 ... not a time to explore unconventional spiritual views, at least not in public ... more interesting is the convoluted justifications for carnal drives within rigid moral codes ... and a more compassionate drawing of Henry than expected ... next up, a book discovered in the Durham Oxfam Bookshop on the Albigensian Heresy and how that turned out a few centuries before our randy and murderous Henry ... the joys of life without a television ... the joys of life without torture and immolation for heretics!

On the subject of the TV free life, still a minority pursuit in 21st Century UK, the time and space created by eschewing it is only one of the benefits, perhaps the greatest boon is removing the hypnotic method and the brain rotting material ... the constant drip of fear fomenting rolling "news" along screens ... trailers for more in depth treatment of spurious debates on politics, "celebrity" antics, scary weather and so on, stitched together to keep our focus on the banal and inviting us to take up emotionally driven opinions on issues we have no control over .... like the nicotine habit kicked ten years ago, the TV habit has no attraction these days ...

Local drama plays on in the background .... though very much in the foreground for the main characters ... the victim of bullying and injustice and the perpetrator ... both of whom are worthy of compassion, though it is the victim who is a friend .... the philosophical question, a luxury for the non-combatant, is how to maintain non-judgement without abandoning the friend ... perhaps the key, and one with general application, is to differentiate between the actor and the action, to discern the merits of the action without judging the actor, who, after all, is playing a script and maybe an old one. Let's see how that plays out!