My morning ritual

 Taking impetus from a recent post of the esteemed Dr Spo's blog, I thought "Well why not me too? After all, nobody else knows this of me".

As in just a few weeks' time I'll be entering my ninth(!) decade, with the likelihood that I'm not going to be in this world for that much longer, instead of leaving this one particular aspect of my life unknown, why not tell everyone of a rather unusual long-term habit of mine. 

Starting just after I left school at the age of 16, and continuing right up to the present - while even adding further to it over the last 60+ years - I've adhered to it, if not for every single day since, then certainly more than 95% of those days. Maybe some of you'll think I'm as mad as a March Hare, but now I'm past caring. 

So, most mornings by far, being a news-junkie, after catching up on world news via BBC and Sky while eating brekkies, I go through this:-

 

1. Revise my memorising of all the Shakespeare Sonnets - one per day, so that in a year I'll have covered each of them at least twice. I first began doing this about 25 years ago. Why? Well, why not? 

2. Revision of around 60 poems I know by heart, from various writers of all periods. Again, one per day - plus another one per day of selected poems I don't yet know verbatim, though that may come in time. 

3. Read 3 poems per day from the anthology 'Oxford Book of English Verse 1250 -1918', following the alphabetical index of first lines. Nearly 1,000 poems in all.

4. Three poems from volumes of certain individual poets, currently they are Robert Browning and Dylan Thomas which I'm reading in tandem.

          
                                                                    

5. Read a paragraph or so from a micropedia of British history 7,000 B.C.E. up to the 1990s.

6. I read a passage from the Bible (Do you gasp? Well, don't worry)

Having completed 10 readings in three versions of the whole darned volume from cover-to-cover over some six decades about 10 years ago, I'm currently re-reading, for the umpteenth time, the New Testament gospels and the epistles, the latter especially being a crashing bore!  How anyone on Earth can call the Bible their "favourite book" and to mean it is beyond my comprehension. 

Both Old and New Testaments (even in the widely revered King James version), moreso the former, are turgid, flat - and annoyingly sparse on detail, leaving the reader to imagine it as they wish. Of course there are a fair number of episodes we all know - the Creation, Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel,  Ten Commandments, Plagues of Egypt, Exodus, Samson & Delilah etc etc. plus, but of course, the life and death of J.C., but there are really not so many - yet all separated by acres on acres of ennui - and oh, all those endless genealogies! Yawn, yawn, yawn. 

7. A section of the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas.

8. A section of the 'Catechism of the Catholic Church'. Why? Same answer.

9. A sura or so from two translations of the Koran - I find distinctly unappealing, even often revolted by.

10 A Chapter-Text (with explanatory commentary) translated from the Hindu scripture of Bhagavad-Gita. Yes, it does go on forever and ever, though rarely 'dull'.

Then, if I'm so minded, I might read a section of a book on Yoga (philosophy of, rather than physical practice) plus, maybe, a section of the 'Tibetan Book of the Dead'.

All the above will usually take me about an hour, after which 

I'll do me some physical exercises - stretching, balancing, muscle strengthening, with some basic Tai-Chi thrown in.

Thus start most of my days - after which, I can get on with my 'normal' day, perhaps shopping for fresh food (twice a week) - then another reading of Boccaccio's 'Decameron' - which I'm now near finishing for the third time, though this time in two translations together - then start my monthly reading of a Shakespeare play (this month it's 'Merchant'). This is a habit I've pursued ever since I was about 18, never ever having missed a single month - then followed by my choice of yet another third, and surely final, reading (before it's too late) of Hermann Hesse's 'The Glass Bead Game'. 

Then, for a change, I might catch up on iPlayer with 'Traitors' - right now the Canadian version, as I've become addicted to all Traitors programmes from whichever country is currently available. The Irish one I've found particularly good.

Ah well! Such is life! Heigh-ho! 😄