R is for...

1) Reincarnation. This features in “Despite the Angels” and my next book “Revisited Sins”, but both are works of fiction and it is not necessary to believe that reincarnation happens to enjoy the story. All the same, it is a fun way to look at the world and for me at the moment, it explains some of the crazy things that happen. In the ancient world it was a much more accepted idea than it is now, and there are examples in the Bible, as well as in Jewish and Islamic writings that show that the writers thought that reincarnation was the case. In the early Christian church, it was accepted as fact until the Ecumenical Council meeting in 533AD. This meeting of the church was gerrymandered by the Roman Emperor Justinian of Constantinople who did not believe in reincarnation (or at least did not want Christians to, possibly because if your followers think they have more than one life in which to get it right, they are harder to control) and who packed the meeting with 159 of his followers from the Eastern Church, when only 6 of the Western branch of the church were in attendance. Pope Vigilius was so incensed by this that he refused to attend the meeting (and was subsequently persecuted by Justinian - imagine if this happened now..) so according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia this meeting was not genuine and its decisions are actually null and void - so it is only a fluke that all of us who were brought up Christian were not taught routinely that we would have future lives!!

2) Reader. I am an avid one, and used to be a very fast one. Going on a holiday was always a bit nerve-racking, would I bring enough books? I had to pick carefully, nice thick books, not too frothy, to slow myself down a bit, books I wouldn’t mind discarding when I had read them, which was very difficult, books in my family have almost household-god status! Then I got a Reader and life changed. My first one was a Sony EReader, which was okay, but I had constant problems getting books off the Waterstone’s site to actually go onto the device; I haunted the local Sony shop, and a lovely guy Greg there had almost as much difficulty as me. Then I got a Kindle, and its one-stop-you-don’t-need-your-pc function is a dream! But my eyes aren’t as good as they were, (since cataract ops they are full of huge floaters, so just making the print bigger doesn’t always work) and my reading speed has dropped, so my kindle is full of books I haven’t read yet. So is my house, of the paper variety!

3) Rhus Tox This is a good medicine for muscle or joint pain which is worst after being immobile, but which improves on being worked out.