But where's the engine?

This'll be a continuation, more or less, of yesterday's posting.
Firstly, I have it on good authority that the method of measuring the snow in that last piece is accurate.

We now have over a foot, as can clearly be seen here. No need to find something to lean the bike against:

Marinoni bicycle, from Canada-to-Mexico days, pressed back into service.

At least it's two wheels, and is now the only way of reaching the shops, unless your car is currently parked at the bottom of the hill, or you like the long walk.
There are a lot of cars parked down there now, partly blocking the Eastbourne Road.

The main roads aren't very clear (but OK for bicycle), and the road into Caterham worse, with no gritting today I think. Max speed for the few cars that were there was about ten mph, on a couple of inches of compacted snow and ice. So I'm worried - if they don't make a proper effort soon to clear those roads, that Global Warming will never get through to reach us. Then what do we do??

In the meantime, life continues, as does the falling snow.
And a note for Canadian readers (a few I think). Yes, what a lot of fuss about nothing, wringing of hands, schools and dentists closed, Gatwick Airport closed, no buses nor trains, nor post nor milk deliveries. Nor nothing else more-or-less. It's what makes England what it is.........

Caroline and Beau are due to fly into Heathrow tomorrow after six months in Sudan........ hope they have good reindeer-skin sleeping bags for the couple of days it'll take for trains to reach them and take them to Eastbourne.

Secondly, also continuing on from the previous posting, about what it was like to return home.
I was trying to think of a way of expressing that feeling of being happy to be wandering around in strange places, and at the same time having an anchor back home to return to, when the time feels right and for as long as it feels right.
Well, it happened again, that "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear" thing.
I was half listening to something on the radio, a discussion on books recently published, when a presenter mentioned the name "Rumi." Hearing the name made me start listening properly.

A good few years ago there was a big Rumi festival in London, it was in preparation for his 800th birthday or something like that, so I went to some of the music events.
Rumi was a Sufi mystic and prophet and poet who made all sorts of statements about life in his time and in the future, many of which still seem relevant today.
Sufism is generally seen as a mystic or more spiritual arm of Islam, but someone I met in Khartoum disagreed with that quite forcefully. We were in a taxi going back to the campsite after the Friday afternoon prayers at the Hamed el-Nil Mosque in Omdurman. The main event for us had been the huge ceremony of drumming and trance-like dancing by participants from all over northern Sudan. And those participants are mainly followers of Sufism.
Well, our taxi driver was most emphatic, that these people are not of the Moslem faith. He insisted that Sufism had nothing to do with Islam and felt that we should understand that. So obviously, all is not as it seems.

Anyway, back to the radio. Rumi travelled quite extensively himself through the Persian empire and Middle East, eventually settling in Turkey. And I learnt from the radio programme that Rumi's philosophy about travelling in the thirteenth century was that the traveller should think of himself as a compass. With one leg firmly anchored at a single place in the ground, and the other leg able to trace endless circles all over the place, all over the world. As an analogy to this trip of mine, that'll do nicely, thank you very much.

The larger pictures now go back to Botswana. Will do more of them when I receive another round tuit.