Pains & Aches

I seem to be recovering well from the exercise I've been doing. Other than a very minor nagging pain in my right side, barely noticeable most of the time, I feel in good shape. I tend to take it for granted when I feel okay, and I suppose when I was younger I assumed it as a kind of natural right, the way things were meant to be. A few years of persistent back pain have cured me of that illusion but, even now, I don't feel as thankful as I should for the mercy of good health. So I'll say thanks for it now.

Living in comfortable circumstances is also one of those slices of enormous good fortune one does not in any sense deserve. This morning I awoke to startling pictures on tv of floods in Sheffield. A whole stretch of the M1, a stretch up and down which I used to travel regularly, was immersed. These will be hard times for some of the home-owners there, even though they're probably generally better-off than the people in Malaysia whose homes were flooded earlier this year. A crisis of that nature I suspect would be likely to bring out the worst in me after a life of easy-living.