These Lively Oracles

I am not a big follower of sports and athletics. I never really have been. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about sports at school and I never really supported any of the main sporting teams. I do, however, like to watch some of the lesser well known and less popular sports. Dodgeball. The Lumberjack Championships, or the Ambulance / Fire and Rescue competitions keep me attentive. I enjoy to watch the Para-lympics. These are sports competitions for the “lesser-abled” in our society. So I recently watched a movie. It is called “The Best Of Men” and it was about the rehabilitation of men who had been injured during WW2. I’ll not ruin the movie for you but I would suggest you watch it sometime. Also around the time I watched it there was an incident which made the news about an occurrence at the recent European Athletics Team Championships . At the event , two of the Belgian 100m hurdle runners had to suddenly drop out of the race. If no one ran for Belgium then the country would be eli...

  Online scams are big in the news these days. We hear of all sorts of things from Nigerian princes who want to use your bank account so that they can store their money until they can escape some perceived regime, to fictitious emails telling us that we have a parcel that couldn’t be delivered and we have to click onto a link to claim it. We get photos sent to us of someone posing as an attractive person telling us that they want to meet us. Or we get phone calls informing us that we are supposed to have been involved in an accident or we need new double glazing. All these things share one thing in common. They all want access to your bank account. But, scams are not a new thing. Back in the 1980’s Christians, Preachers and Pastors were telling us not to buy household cleaning products manufactured by a company called Proctor And Gamble with Fairy Liquid, Head And Shoulders, Pampers all being amongst the most well known products. The manufacturers of these products were inv...

We are off for a wee citybreak for a few days. But please keep reading and sharing my thoughts, musings and blogs. I’ll be back for next week’s blog. In the meantime keep sharing the blogs... “Follow” the blog-page... Message me on Facebook... These Lively  Oracles... Or Twitter @livelyoracles58  ... Or send me an email at...  TheseLivelyOracles@hotmail.com.  I’d love to hear from you.  Jesus loves us, somehow. Still. Always has. Always will.

Many, many years ago I did a training course. It was a compulsory training course for anyone who wanted to go and work on oil rigs and in the offshore environment and one part of the training course was to do with firefighting and evacuation. We were trained to put on a similar protective uniform that firemen would wear – jacket, hood, trouser, gloves, headgear and breathing apparatus. We were also instructed how to put in the breathing masks so that we could move through a smoke filled chamber and find our way out. We all did this part of the course. We were to make our way through a fully enclosed maze that was filled with smoke and once it filled up with smoke our vision went down to zero. We couldn’t see a single thing in front of us. And we had to manoeuvre our way through this maze using the techniques we were taught and get out the other side. But the safety factor came into play when some firemen were closely following us through the maze using some thermal cameras. The...

Many, many years ago while I was an apprentice electrician I remember working in a large supermarket that need to be refurbished. Me and another apprentice had to climb up a large scaffolding and fit some high level lighting. These lights were over 2m long, we were 10m above the ground and it was very tricky to get them fitted. I was struggling trying to fit one particular fitting. I had tried to get it to fit several times and I was getting visibly frustrated when my buddy suddenly said “Put your tongue to the other side of your mouth”. In my frustration I looked at him and deliberately stuck my tongue out of one side of my mouth. And while looking at him in a derogatory fashion I moved my tongue to the other side of my mouth, all the while thinking to myself, ‘fat lotta good that’s gonna do’. I bent down and lifted the fitting back up to its enclosure and it slotted in first time. I gave him a look which said ‘smart-ass’ and he gave me a look which said ‘I know’. Did the distra...