Grey
...knitting rather a lot in grey at the moment and I keep making mistakes. As a diversion, I went out in this weather to a movie everyone had raved about but I wasn't so keen... .
Sometimes you do better in terms of entertainment on the street. For instance, I got chatting with an old style Dubliner at the table next to me over lunch, who was very wound up about a banner headline proclaiming that eight people had been tested for ebola in Ireland...
"Worser even than AIDS - at least they have a cure for that".
"Well in the beginning they didn't", I felt I had to say. "Which is not to say that what's happening in West Africa isn't scandalous, of course..."
"Look!" he said, brandishing his newspaper - he had a blue swallow tattoo on his hand. "In black-and-white", he said - "here in this country..",
"But the tests were clear !", I said "That's just a headline! When you read further, you see the people were tested, and didn't have it. Fortunately!".
"Is that so?", he said, clearly not wholly convinced.
To mollify him, I said, "Mind you, people will probably have to start dying in serious numbers at this end of the world before they really go to work on a cure".
"They never tell you the truth", he muttered "The authorities. Can't believe the gospel out any of their mouths".
"Hard to know who or what to believe alright these days".
A lull followed: food arrived for me... He didn't seem to be eating himself.
He spoke again - "I hope I'm not interrupting", he said. "But I can talk about sickness. You see, two year ago I beat the rheumatoid arthuritis".
"Rheumatoid arthritis - that's really terrible..." I said, and meant it.
"I stopped it in its tracks be stopping the wheat. Pure poison, the wheat. I read a book be a man, and went and seen him give a talk. Never looked back since. I'm living proof and a medical mystery to the doctors. The wheat can be held accountable for a lot over and beyond my own personal health complaints, I can tell you... many cancers too. It's all down there in black-and-white in that man's book. If only people knew, they'd be shocked", he said.
An adjacent group of students from the nearby College of Surgeons were beginning to glance over.
"Well you look great to me considering. I've heard rheumatoid arthritis is tough", I said.
"I hope I'm not spoiling your lunch" (which was on wheat bread), he said politely.
"Not at all, go on", I said, and he did.
"The natural way is the only way", he pronounced. "That and the supplements you can buy through the man as wrote the book - Stick with the natural - that's what saved me where no hospital could. Hospitals and doctors know nothing - they're all brainwashed and murdering people with their side effects"
At this point, some of the College of Surgeons students were beginning to show signs of chipping in.
"Have you ever heard about a man who says there's no god?" I asked so there wouldn't be a fight. "He says we're just carriers of intelligent ideas that keep coming back and back again in different ways. Don't know what I think about it, but it's an interesting way of looking at ..."
"Has he written a book?" he asked definitively.
"Yes,"
"What's his name?"
So I told him and he took out a bookie's biro and wrote it down laboriously on my food receipt.
When he was finished, "I'm not what you'd call a classically religious man", he said, "But I read in black- and-white in the bible that god sent his only forgotten son to earth to save mankind".
"His only...Well I suppose we'll be alright so", I said.