Found things

I have found various things so far while cleaning:

1) the cap for my USB flash drive. Yay!

2) 60 euro cents and about 80 pence in British.

3) some information about the International Planned Parenthood Federation, about which I had completely forgotten. I requested it because of something I found out about donkeys. Donkeys are wonderful things, and to stand near one will automatically improve your quality of life. (Unless it bites or kicks you, but that's not that likely.) However, donkey charities are the best supported in the UK, apparently, and those who rescue donkeys have no need to scrape together the cash to do so. I'm glad for the donkeys! But there are other charities doing excellent stuff who are hit by image problems. In particular, contraception, which seems to me like one of the best ideas ever, is such a controversial topic to some people that charities which support it miss out on huge tranches of potential income. The International Planned Parenthood Federation works to educate about contraception and distribute it, and also to reduce the number of unsafe abortions carried out in the world. My aunt is a reproductive health doctor and she says that something like 2 out of every 5 pregnancies in the UK is aborted. I hold no brief for foetuses, and am not at all sure what to think about them, so I'm going to leave that issue to one side; but look at it solely from the point of view of the women involved. That's a vast number of women going through a nasty physical and really horrible emotional experience. (A friend described her abortion to me in horrendous detail once as we went round a Titian exhibition, with all those Flayed Marsayes and Rape of Lucreces -- I hadn't asked but in humanity I pretty much had to let her tell me.) Better contraception, and more of it, I say! In the meantime the IPPF allows one to donate online.

4) A sermon I wrote a long time ago. A couple of times the chaplain suggested I should preach, and I always demurred, rightly I think. But I did once have an idea for a sermon so I wrote it down. It was about the problems with the secular view of self-respect.

5) The service sheet from the funeral of Jeremy Maule, a great scholar and teacher, who died in 1998. It was the first Cambridge funeral I went to, with the choir singing the nunc dimittis around the coffin under Trinity Great Gate. He had had a few weeks' notice of his death and had planned the obsequies himself, with hymns and readings from Donne; they were distinctly uncomfortable, as of someone who did not want to die. This was appropriate. He was only in his early forties. Just to be selfish for a moment, I imagine my life would be different if he had lived, because he was very supportive of my wanting to branch out into early modern stuff.