Wednesday, March 20th .....

It’s my Craft Fair committee meeting tonight and the main item on the agenda is the selection of a new logo.  The original logo has been around for 25 years or more and is certainly looking dated.  To reflect the reality of the Craft Fair today and in the future, we need a new slick logo which highlights the quality and professionalism of the organisation.  Note that, if we were a football club, I would have started that last sentence with ‘Going forward ...’ which would have immediately tagged us as a jumped-up, pseudo- professional bunch of innocents, led by a rag-tag collection of has-beens and wannabees.

Yesterday, Marilyn and I had been roped in to attend one of the local Probus clubs. I think there are three in the region: Mens, Womens and Mixed.  The Mixed club is having a hard time of it with numbers reduced to about 8.  I nearly said numbers dropping-off but that might have an unfortunate connotation.  At the last minute, Marilyn wasn’t able to change her baby-sitting responsibility so I went on my own.  It was quite interesting and it was good to be seen as a youngster rather than one of the greybeards.

They meet in the Uniting Church Hall.  I noticed a small collection of books in the corner and couldn’t resist having a look.  They say you can tell a lot about a person by looking at his or her library.  Does the same thing apply about a church library?  There was the usual small number of picture books for kids with an emphasis on the Easter Story – I imagine that would have to have been heavily modified.  There was a book called Dealing with Dawkins.  At a quick glance, it was generally of the type, “He must be wrong because we know we are right.”  I would have thought the best way to deal with a publicity-seeking atheist would be to ignore him and starve him of the oxygen of attention.

There were a couple of books on the imminent end of the Earth, and some re-printed emails with uplifting stories and dramatic photographs of rainbows, fiery sunsets and light beams through the clouds.  Most worrying were a couple of pamphlets revealing some secrets of Islam.  Again, a quick glance seemed to reveal that they’re different to us so we should be careful how we deal with them.

I should also say that few, if any, of the books looked like they had been read.

The harvesters came yesterday, and again today to collect the next-door onions. The harvester drives slowly along the rows, sweeping the onions up and into a truck which creeps along-side.  Truck after truck was filled and driven away for the next step in the process.  The air is filled with the smell of onions crushed under the wheels and the ground is strewn by onions which have been rejected by the harvester or, more likely, missed by the scoops.