3rd August

And the perfect holiday weather continues. It was supposed to be cloudy today but that never happened and at certain times that would have been quite welcome. It was my son’s 24^th birthday today and he chose to spend the day at Dover Castle which is an amazing place, certainly one of the more engaging castles in the country with it’s mixture of medieval, Napoleonic and 20^th Century wartime history. So it was in the 30 minute queue for the Secret Wartime Tunnels that a bit of cloud cover would have been very welcome though we found a great big tree for the ice cream treat at one point and the tunnels were certainly much cooler. It was absolutely baking hot. But what a great day.

I have long been fascinated with history and sometimes try and imagine what it would have been like to live in a particular time period very different from our own. My lifetime has seen so many changes in the way we live that the young of today would barely recognise any similarity to my childhood. It was a very different world immediately post-war and hard to imagine food-rationing, gas masks still lying around, dolly tubs, shared telephone lines, black and white TV and very limited consumer technology. Electronic innovation has transformed our world in the most comprehensive way invading every area of life progressively through the 20^th century and beyond.

At root though there is one basic that has and will always exist and that can be summed up in one word… love. I love my family and they love me. I sometimes wonder if the social networking world we are creating today is really conducive to building strong relationships with any real sense of intimacy. I can see the benefit of a simple tool to help reconnect with people who move on but so often it feels really quite shallow and only able to relay information, ignorant of emotional response especially with non-existent unconscious body language.

So I reckon medieval life had as much going for it in the love stakes as the 21^st century world we live in today. It’s just the dentists and supermarkets and petrol stations and… Jane, I can’t stop remembering my life with her.

Hebrews 13:8 ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.’ (NLT)