Verreaux Eagle Owl

At just a few weeks old! He will grow to be the fourth largest owl!

I have learnt that the worst thing for my leg is sitting in the office chair and driving. After sitting like that for a while it is at its most painful when I stand, walk etc. I di take cocadamol and didn’t nap! 

When I got home today, I had received a letter, a proper one, mind you, from J, who despite all her own awful stuff had taken the time to write to me. In it she had quoted a piece by CS Lewis, that he had written following the death of his wife. What a piece of prose! Just says it as it is, sums it all up. I have copied and pasted below. 

Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.
A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis