Sunday.the official end of British Summer Time.

Good morning journal,the time is now 9:00am,yesterday at this same time it would have been 10:00am,but last night our clocks went back one hour to officially mark the end of British Summer Time,I say official as being in the UK,our summer unofficially ended well over a month ago,oh well,that's the British weather for you.I have been awake for just over forty minutes,I slept well,apart from a couple of occasions when I was awakened,first by two of our dogs,Buttons and Caesar,needing to go outside,and the second time when my wife vacated our bed and went to the lounge,and,as I type,she is asleep on our sofa,I brought a heavy blanket from our bedroom and covered her,my woman needs her rest,she really does work awfully hard looking after me.I must take the opportunity to thank all of my friends who have taken the time to comment on my journal over the past week or so,such kindness is beyond my capabilities to describe,but you have lifted my spirits immeasurably,you all know who you are,and I will be in touch after I have given some deep thought to one friend in particular who I feel very close to for reasons that they will understand,but thank you all.This morning,I have deliberately left my"bionic ears" in their respective cases,when you are deaf like me,you have the choice whether to hear or not,depending of course,if you choose to use your hearing aids.this morning,I have chosen not to,the silence is something only a deaf person can truly fully understand.The world still turns,but you have the opportunity to watch the day unfold at a much slower pace than a hearing person,and,the chance to be closer with God as it does.People don't really understand why I sometimes say that my deafness is a blessing for me,but I look at it this way,if I'm in a crowded room with a lot of people engaged in conversation at the same time,without my ears in,I can read what anyone is saying to me simply by looking at their lips,if they speak in a normal tone and look at me while they speak,I"hear" what they are saying by lip reading,I'm very good at it,and they are always the first one to say "pardon?",when the noise makes it hard for them to hear,so,to me,I have a much better deal than someone who cannot "switch off" their hearing.It can of course backfire a little,if my wife is speaking to me and then realizes that I'm not answering or paying attention,she comes over and says accusingly,"have you got your ears in mister?",to which I sheepishly have to admit that I don't,but.on the whole,I enjoy the tranquility of these early mornings before the world has truly kicked itself into gear.The new week is almost upon us,and we have my psychiatrist to see on November 1st,if,of course,that appointment doesn't go the same way as my disappearing social worker,I also got word that my follow up appointment at the urology clinic has been penciled in for November 11th,I will find out then if everything is okay with my blood results,the consultant did not give me any reason to think that it would be otherwise,so I am not unduly concerned.This morning as I sit here,I am drawn back to my childhood,I was born and raised in a quiet Scottish village on the shores of Loch Lomond on the west coast,it was an idyllic time for me,and I have a host of golden memories of long hot summer days in the school vacations when my younger brother and myself would leave home early after sunrise,armed with a box of sandwiches made by our mother,and a bottle of a wonderful brew called "sugarally watter",(prounounced sugarAlly waht-ter). It was made the night before by putting hard sticks of liquorice into a bottle of clear tap water,shaken up and left in a cupboard overnight,and in the morning,there would be left this thick,black,wonderfully tasting nectar,and nothing I have tasted since has ever come close to challenging it for the best taste ever in a boy's life,and of course,after consuming this delightful brew,my brother and I had the additional magic of extricating the liquorice sticks from the empty bottle and eating them too.I remember on the top of a hill overlooking our village there was a huge rock in the shape of a dragon,all the boys in the village called it "hotbreath",and we would spend part of our time engaged in battle with him,before finally slaying him with wooden swords made from fallen tree branches and standing victoriously over him with our swords held high in triumph.Those were magical days indeed,I was young,full of spit and vinegar,....and I could breathe,now,today,I am showing signs of decay and deterioration that we couldn't even imagine back then,we were immortal and death was something that was reserved for tree goblins and dragons called hotbreath,it saddens me a little to think that those days are gone forever,but time marches on,and my younger brother and I are now separated by four hundred miles and two different countries,he still lives in that tiny Scottish village while I live in a crowded tourist resort in the north west of England,we don't talk as much as we used to on the telephone,he sometimes sends me an e-mail,but we are older now,and the ties that bound us as children have long gone,we are where we are and who we are now,but I still long for just some of the closeness we used to share back in those sun drenched and carefree days.I remember before my brother and I left home on our adventures,my mother would always say to us,"Tha gaol agam ort",to which we would reply,"Tha gaol agam ort cuideachd",she was saying,"I love you",in Gaelic,our mother tongue,and we were saying back to her,"I love you too",sadly,today I have very little occasion to speak in Gaelic anymore,indeed,I have trouble remembering my native tongue,just another regret from days gone by.Well journal,today,I will spend time resting and recharging my batteries a little in preparation for the effort I will have to find for the next week or two,it saddens me that every trip outside our home has to be planned with almost military like precision,I no longer have the capabilities to walk for any distance,and I become exhausted just by standing for any length of time,but there are much worse off people than I,and until we hear from some department,organization or individual in authority than can help make things better for us,it is what it is.I am me,the same me as I have always been,except for sharing my mind with three other people from the Bible,but I'm still standing,and with Jesus in my corner,I'll continue to do just that.