LE PALACE IDEAL - AND WHAT IT TEACHES US!

I am not at all sure why I thought that this was something that I thought was somehow really  relevant – relevant enough at this time to include in this Blog! ….. but somehow it just would not let  me ignore it.

At the end of the 1800, an ordinary – very ordinary – hard working mail man in France walked 20 miles every day to deliver mail to the far-flung farms and houses.  It was a case of get up very early, walk his twenty miles, come home, eat, sleep and repeat!  Every day, six days per week.  

One day he was on his usual route and he tripped over a stone.  Instead of just cursing and kicking the stone out of the way, he was fascinated by the it and picked it up and  at the end of the day took it home.  He lay in bed, despite his tiredness, he could not help rolling the stone around in his hands nor get it out of his mind.  And then he had a notion.  A completely mad, bonkers notion and a notion that would have made his neighbours, probably his wife, and all of us, believe that he had ‘lost the plot’.  He would build his own house – with the stones that he picked up along the way. 

Such a ridiculous notion!  He had no experience, no real building materials – apart from stones, pebbles, rocks that he could pick up while he worked.  Not  to mention that he was already working long hours, long days, walking 20 miles a day with only one day per week off.  How on earth could he do such a thing?  Was it not just some kind of pipedream!

To anybody with half a brain, had they known what was in his head, would have thought him either mad or at the very least that it was merely wishful thinking.  That was not an issue, because he neither consulted anybody else, nor did he have to ask permission from anybody else, since nobody owned the pebbles, stones, rocks, that littered his delivery  route.

He rubbed and polished the stone and every day, en route, he gathered more stones.  First in his pockets, then in a bag, and finally he pushed a wheelbarrow the twenty miles each and every day (bar Sundays) collecting stones and suitable rocks.  These he polished and moulded until about thirty years later, when he was a very old man, he finally had built a house in which he was able to live his final few years.

AN ACCIDENTAL TAPESTRY

How many wars, upheavals and strife are caused by the moving finger of fate that decides on race, religion, wealth, health, social status or criminality?

I currently live in England and sometimes in Spain, but have lived in Ireland as well.  My mother was Irish Catholic, my father was English Protestant, his grandfather was Jewish Russian. I have an extended family comprising not only Irish, English, and Welsh, but people from the Caribbean, from India, from Cyprus, from Estonia … from Mars for all I know – there are one or two of us who are a bit ‘alien looking’!

I doubt that any of us even know what blood runs in our veins. Hence, I guess the modern trend and fad for DNA testing – which must be earning the competing companies a pretty penny. Not saying that there are crooks in the game, but if I sent off for my ‘analysis’ and it came back as mixture of Inuit/Aborigine/Falkland Islander/Irish/Russian …. would I/could I challenge that? I could pay another 100 dollars to ‘go