Life is many strange things, is it not?

Every day I find myself wondering at how life manages to present us with the worst and the best. My daughter is growing in front of my eyes, every day bringing joy to me with her little ways. Just today she ran up to me and rested her chin on my knee while looking up at me with those laughing, mischievous eyes of hers. Later, while she was trying to water the garden, she and I watched as a paraglider swooped low over our house; the forgotten hose spraying water everywhere and wetting our shoes. On the other hand you read about things such as the Israeli government holding the whole Palestinian nation hostage by rolling tanks into the Gaza Strip and kidnapping Palestinian Ministers in reply to the kidnapping of a single Israeli soldier, showing once again that they have no intention of communicating with the Palestinians in any manner other than through the use of massive, disproportionate violence, much as a man might kick a barking dog. Or, on another level but in much the same way, you see how normal people standing in a queue at the supermarket are willing to turn vicious and snap at each other at the slightest opportunity. Watching it all I get a profound feeling of how life is fecund with diversity, overflowing with a multitude of tinctures that endlessly transform everything they touch. It is a reality as far removed from Puritan imaginings as one could consider; a reality that’s kin to the rich humour of Rabelais or the visions of Peter Greenaway.

I really hope that, as she grows up, my daughter will come to appreciate this richness rather than to fear it, so that she might come to live accepting that life is precious, happiness tenuous and every day steeped in the many essences of being a beast that reasons and recognises itself reflected in the water.