You know how there's always incredibly cheap flights, except for the date when you want to go? Ryan Air is having a free flights sale today. Wait for it, wait for it . . . It actually covers the time I want to go to London (lasts until Monday kiddies).
I'm planning to go to London and Edinburgh at the end of the month, to see George when she visits from New Zealand, and to check out schools of osteopathy for next year. Hurrah.
I watched the movie Paradise Road last night. It was Cate Blanchett's first movie, about a group of women in a Sumatran prison camp during the war.
It made me think about my distinct lack of knowledge. In the film, one of the women writes out musical scripts which she knows by heart. Not only do I not know the words of a single song, I also don't know any poems. If I were stuck in a prison camp for several years, I would carry nothing with me from the thousands of books I've read, the hundreds of films I've seen.
I appreciate that I have a terrible memory, but I don't think I'm alone. I used to have a fabulous book of Parlour Poetry, the sort that Victorian children would have to learn to recite for the edification of their elders. I suspect most small children today can barely write (although whizzes on the computer, no doubt).
I found a great site today, worldprayers.org. It's a collection of prayers and meditations from across beliefs and religions. They have selected prayers for peace, which I don't particularly like (probably because they're all a bit hackneyed), but also a couple of ways of choosing random celebrations, invocations and meditations.
For the skeptics amongst you (yes, including me), this was my random one for today:
"The word, which is often translated simply as prayer means literally 'wish-path' (Tibetan: smon-lam). It is not a request to an external deity, but a method of purifying and directing the mind. It acts as inspiration by arousing the mind's inherent desire for good, which attracts the fulfillment of its aim."
-The Tibetan Book of the Dead