Out of sight jigsaws, and sushi...

It seems only yesterday that I wrote in here that I had given up chocolate for Lent...Well, I've done it again...Chocolate AND coffee this year, so my nerves are on fire — constant red alert. Only another 35 days to go though (apparently Sundays don't count as Lenten days!).

Anyway, I really can't believe that it has rolled around again, and that Lent is here. Time is relentless.

I should be keeping an eye on time...making sure it doesn't just pass me by. It is not just me saying that, apparently it was a direct message from angels for me (if you believe that kind of thing....)

When I got back in touch with my dad (Brendan) again, the time just before I ended up in the car, he heard about a woman in Ireland who was a mystic and received messages from angels. He got in touch with her, in fact I think he drove up to see her. I don't know to this day what he said to her but in amongst other things he asked her to pray for me. He later gave me her telephone number and urged me to call her, saying she would be expecting my call. I didn't know what to say, and wasn't going to, but one day in the midst of this, feeling very foolish, I found myself dialing her number.

A softly spoken Irish lady answered, but it clearly wasn't a good time for her — I think she was in a hurry to pick one of her children up from somewhere (yes, she also has children and lives in a modern house in a modern part of Ireland). She said she had received a message for me though — that the angels had given her a message saying that I had many talents that I was in danger of wasting, and that time was running out. Which seemed like a message that could be for anyone really..... She said she was very busy and couldn't talk but that I should give her my address and that she would write to me with the message.

I thought she was fobbing me off, but I gave her my address in Newcastle anyway and a few weeks later a letter did arrive. It took up only one side of paper and repeated the message from the angels: saying that they stressed that I needed to be particularly careful about time, and not to let it slip by. Which at the time I thought was a very strange message, even though that is what I have always tended to do in my life. I was a bit disappointed in a way, of all the things that angels could tell you....especially me in the lost state I was in at the time. She also gave me the name of my two guardian angels. Names which weren't in English, but which, even though I was sceptical of the whole thing anyway, I still found a bit unsettling seeing written down in the letter. She said all I needed to do was call the name and ask them to come down and they would. I remember rolling the sounds of their names around my tongue and for a few days finding myself silently saying them. But then I got frightened of what I was doing and tried to forget them — which, unfortunately, I have now succeeded in doing. (Though I think I still have the letter somewhere.)

I'd never met this woman myself. All I knew was her name, and her voice...

Then yesterday, in a local bookshop, I stepped aside to let past a couple pushing a toddler in a buggy, and as I did so knocked up against one of the bookcases. A display book standing face-out on the edge of one of the shelves threatened to topple. It was a new hardback with a very appealing light-filled cover. As I reached up to straighten it, I instinctively read the title, and then my eyes shot up to the author's name. Because suddenly I knew who it was. And as I read the authors name I saw it was her. The woman with the message for me from the angels. She has a book out, an autobiography called Angels In My Hair. Her name is Lorna Bryne, and she is apparently Kosher — for those who believe.

Brendan still has her telephone number and gave it to me again yesterday when I told him. Though I wouldn't dare call her again. But how odd...Time did run out for me in the end and I ended up in my car. So in a way the message was right. And then I wrote an autobiography. An autobiography which came right at the right time in the publishing world in a way. And now the person who gave me that message has written her autobiography too - with many more books to come it seems. It gave me shivers standing there in the bookshop holding it in my hands. Kind of...sort of...in a way...mysterious...

You can get yourself in a state of mind where things start to feel like proof. As if someone is laying a trail... constantly nudging, giving you more and more clues saying: Now do you believe? Now do you ...? How about now...? as they fill in this spiritual join-the-dots in your head.