What?

I looked up a book by Alison Freer, published in May 2015 and called How To Get Dressed, recommended on Anuschka Rees’s blog The Curated Closet. I like that title, but loved its previous name, Into Mind.

How To Get Dressed, as a title, also amused me. Thinking it showed promising signs of humour, I checked it out. If you include the sub-title, its full moniker is How To Get Dressed: A Costume Designer’s Secrets For Making Your Clothes Look, Fit, and Feel Amazing. I don’t know why the “and” lost its capital, but let’s not lose sleep over that.

Arriving on Amazon, what I found was a completely different book by Annie Ramsay, published in March 2016 and called (including its subtitle) How To Get Dressed: A Costume Designer’s Secrets For Looking Fit, Slim and Amazing in Your Clothes, self-published on Amazon’s Create Space.

The breathtaking cheek of that plagiarism!!!! How could she do that?

In the time-frame of the same week, I was puzzled by my failure to find a particular line in a worship song we were singing. It said: Till He returns or calls me home - here in the power of Christ I’ll stand. “But where’s the bit,” I wondered, bewildered, that says When he shall come with trumpet sound, oh, may I then in him be found?”

Turns out I had mentally conflated Hillsong’s 2012 song about Christ alone; cornerstone with the 2002 song by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend, In Christ alone - which speaks of Christ as our cornerstone. My hope is built on nothing less, Hillsong's lyrics begin; Getty/Townend's - In Christ alone my hope is found. Even the tunes are eerily similar. I should say at the very least Hillsong's guys owe Getty and Townsend a drink. This rendition follows one on from the other for handy comparison. Well, hey - I like them both.

But is this level of plagiarism now okay? Perhaps we're back to the days when one scribe copied another, cheerfully expanding and embellishing as he thought fit, such that Paul (did he have poor eyesight?) claims authenticity in Galatians 6.11 with his See what big letters I make as I write to you know with my own hand!

Of recent times

I don’t mean recent times in the news – xenophobia, threat of nuclear war, the arrogant spread of Mammon’s slime mould converting real resources into the vanity of money at a disheartening rate, the ever-widening gap between rich and poor sticking two fingers up at the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s all there, and it fills me with grief, even despair if I let it. But for now, for my sanity I’ve stepped back from it to look at the small and close-at-hand.

In our garden we’re coming on to “all is safely gathered in” time, blackberries, greengages, apples, pears and beans safely stashed in the freezer. Our beans did so well. We planted only a small row, half a dozen plants along a bed no more than four foot or so, growing up bamboo poles against the balustrade of our little deck (the back door is three foot higher than the garden, so we step out onto a deck, then three steps down to the garden). We’ve been eating them every day for several weeks, and had enough to freeze a few bags as well. We’re onto the last few now.

As well as things to eat, the fir cone harvest (brilliant kindling) has done us proud as well.

Then, in other matters, Our Alice and Hebe went to stay for a few days at Minster in Thanet to learn about making icons – an extra strand they have for some time intended to add to their daily work.

This was the result of a few days’ making:

Otherwise life continues as normal – writing, cooking, painting, stone-cutting, making music, cleaning, talking, thinking, praying – all the things we do. Humans, foxes, crows, badgers, seagulls - and of course, cats.

"For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat." 

(from Christopher Smart's poem about his cat Jeoffry in Jubilate Agno)

Blessings on your day. xx