One of my great nephews, George, who is twelve and at school in Wellington New Zealand, was required along with others in his class to write a speech on the subject ‘What do you need for the future.’ Many chose ‘Adaptability.’ George chose ‘Connections.’

I have been sent the beginning and ending of what he wrote and, with his permission, I am including it in my ‘Thoughts.’

‘What is the most important skill for the future? is it Creativity? Communication? Adaptability? I thought about it for a while, but I realised, connections are what form society.  Think about it. If no one knew anyone else then where would we be?’

‘So, what is the point of this speech?  I wanted to emphasise the importance of our connections, how important it is to a whole, as well as an individual. How now in the modern world we need to be careful with our connections . But we also need to help someone in need.  And just maybe, you could lay the first beam in a bridge, because humanity needs commitment to building bridges, not walls, because it’s through those bridges that a better world can be build’.

I understand there was a rather gloomy bit in the middle that I’ve not been sent but also there were sentences about the importance of touch with which I would strongly agree. However I too think it is the connections that matter. Thank you George.

I have been told that the key to dealing with the trials of old age is routine and commitment. I am beginning to get mine sorted now I know what this means.

Routine is not only brushing my teeth but also doing Squareword and Wordle first thing in the morning to get my mind going, saying my prayers to do the same for my soul and taking pills at the doctor’s orders for the body.

Commitment is, on most mornings, going to church, or on some, swimming. Commitment, I gather, involves other people and activities when my absence might be noticed. I imagine it includes accepting invitations and inviting people to dinner or to Sunday lunch.

I am sure all this is a good idea and I am doing my best. I am also taking two dessert spoons of extra virgin olive oil in the morning and a modest whisky before bedtime. Here’s to life!

The highlight of this cruise has been the visit to the Greek Island of Patmos. On this island St John, one of the Twelve Disciples of Jesus, received visions of the final days of Earth and the creation of a new Earth as the Holy City.

St John was on Patmos as a prisoner under the persecution of Christians by the Roman Emperor Diocletian. It was while in a cave that St John heard a loud voice instructing him to write down what he had seen in the visions. What he wrote became the final book in the New Testament, The Book of Revelation.

The cave is a place of pilgrimage and a tourist attraction. There is a small Greek Orthodox Church beside the cave high up on the mountain. A monk tends the church and shrine.

There was a tour from our ship to visit the cave and the monastery associated with it. Some of us on the tour were deeply moved by the mystery and the holiness of the place.

It made me think of visionaries and of holy places and our need for both. The first to encourage us to look beyond ourselves the second to acknowledge Holiness present here and now.

The bed on the cruise ship Seabourn Encore seems more comfortable than my bed at home. This bed is higher, wider, has more pillows and a slightly softer mattress than mine, but I don’t think it’s that. It has soft lights that come on to show me the way to my en-suite bathroom when I get up in the night, and its not that either.

Possibly the comfort is not to do with the bed at all. I neither have to make this bed nor tidy and clean this room, which is neither room nor cabin but is a suite. When I get up in the morning and go for my swim the steward says a cheerful, “Good morning, Mr Acland,” and adds, “Enjoy your swim,” which I do despite the water in the pool being unheated and certainly cold.

At breakfast I am again greeted by name and am reminded by the waiter who is from Albania that we have met before on another cruise on a different ship. He seems genuinely pleased to see me.

That happens again at Seabourn Square, ‘Guest Services’, and I recognise, from another cruise, the young woman from Kenya who helps me sort out my iPad connection to the internet. I am really pleased with myself as remembering people is not my strength. She is pleased as well.

The same thing has happened with an English couple I met on a cruise two years ago – enjoyable recognition. We are having dinner together one evening.

In due course I retire to my very comfortable bed thankful for the day and wondering whether it is not the mattress or the pillows so much as the personal encounters with others that make for my comfort.

I am going through boxes of papers, photographs, paintings, exercise books and notebooks sorting, throwing away and, inevitably, putting some things back into boxes. I usually travel with a notebook so that if I hear, see, or come across something that strikes a chord or moves me, I write it down.

In one such notebook, with only a few pages remaining, I had written part of the eulogy given by a father at the funeral of his son who had died in a car accident. The father was William Sloane Coffin, some time Chaplain at Yale University. I did not know him or his son, Alex. I cannot remember where I came across this. Alex died in 1983 at the age of twenty four.

’Nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn’t go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fists around knives, his hands on steering wheels……Never do we know enough to say that a death was the will of God. My own consolation lies in knowing that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.’

I now put this alongside Bishop John Taylor’s saying to me, concerning walking the tightrope of faith and life, in response to my heartfelt questioning about the presence of God should I fall off the tightrope:

”Simon, God falls off with you.”

And, during the Good Friday Three Hours meditation at St Mary Abbots in the 1980’s, when the Venerable Timothy Raphael was giving the addresses, he finished each address with the words:

‘There is a cross buried deep in the heart of God.’