Books are the perfect place to hide from the world

Reading provides mental nourishment, it fuels imagination and introduces ideas.  Reading takes us back and forth in time and through the pages of books we discover places and people.   Now and then books are a refuge, a place to escape to.  2 Weeks ago, we discovered that my father has leukemia.   I don’t need to explain how distraught I felt on hearing the news.  All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and hide away.   I could not do that, what I could do was stick my nose in a light read and give my mind a break from the onslaught of scary thoughts.  I immersed myself in ‘The Old-Girl Network’, Catherine Alliott is perfect escapism reading, her books are written with a light touch and humour.  It will be a while until I feel like getting my teeth into ‘Booker’ type books, until then Chic lit is extremely fit for purpose.  For a long time I turned my nose up at Chic lit, this was most certainly a case of cutting off said nose to spite my face.  Since my sister in-law passed a Katie Fford to me during a visit I have enjoyed this genre more and more, it goes fantastically with other indulgences such as coffee and chocolate.

Once Catherine Alliott was done and dusted I turned to PG Wodehouse and am loving ‘Pigs Have Wings’, I knew that I was in for a treat as soon as I read the lines “There was a snake in his Garden of Eden, a crumpled leaf in his bed of roses, a grain of sand in his spiritual spinach.”  I so want an opportunity to use that, maybe along the lines of “Mrs x is a grain of sand in my spiritual spinach”.

Still outside the world of books, real life continues.  Over 2 weeks, Dad has been for a bone marrow biopsy and had the results back.  By the end of week 1 he was already in hospital and started on chemotherapy.   The prognosis is good now that all the results are in, his form of leukemia is treatable.  Already since being on treatment his white blood cell count is down from 130 to 8 (the normal range is apparently 3 – 10), that’s pretty amazing and certainly due to a lot of prayer and medicine.   He feels tired and low on energy but that is most likely more due to the meds than the illness.  Being Dad, he has hardly taken time off work, other than when he was in hospital (I’m still deciding if I think that’s a good or bad thing).   I am in Durban this week as I wanted to see and spend time with Dad.