Hawk-eyed visitors to this page might have noticed that recently my daily thoughts have been posted later and later in the day. I suppose I’ve slipped into holiday mode - Easter week has always been a bit of a lull after the intensity of Holy Week, and we’ve often found it a good time to get away. Not this year, evidently: but slowing down at home seems a good idea. My excuse today for a later post is food preparation. A dull day – a slow cooker – a nourishing casserole for later: and I found myself, while chopping vegetables, reflecting on my childhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
It wasn’t as I recall it a time of shortage. Each day there were good meals; nutritious soups; baker’s bread and home-made jam; stews and dumplings; bottled fruit; and always a cooked breakfast. How much time and energy my mother must have spent on all this! Qualified for university, but never entering, she spent most of her adult life supporting the one man and two boys in the household: but how much more she was capable of…. Hers was a typical female life of the time, a life of sacrifice – self-giving - for the benefit of her family. And what a generation hers was: the same generation that this week has given us the redoubtable Captain Tom. They have so much to teach us.
Fr John
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