Kirjahaku

At fifty the author discovered she had osteoporosis so severe she was told she would not walk again. The arrival of a Chinese physiotherapist from Hong Kong to a practice at the bottom of her street - in Australia, a Big Country - seemed a miracle. Her full story is told in The Tiger and the Taxi Driver. At sixty-eight, and walking well, she decides to walk the Camino. Will my feet carry me? she asks of him. Are you still overweight? he responds. Yep she says. Best thing you can do for your feet then, osteoporosis responds to weight-bearing And so she walked ...

"D'you speak Hindi?" he asked as WhatsApp texts flew back and forth from continent to island. "Not a known language in Somerset," she replied, with smileys. "I will take you to ossam coffee before we begin", he wrote back. Ossam. Ossam? She took the word for a walk all the way to the next village and almost back again before: "Awesome Awesome coffee " Where else would her taxi driver take her but to a caf with awesome coffee before setting off on the Road Trip of a lifetime.This slightly rearranged version is a stand-alone story from my memoir The Tiger and the Taxi Driver - Book Two. It is a gift to the real taxi driver who looked after me so well during our Himalayan road trip in October 2018, a pilgrimage I had dreamt of for forty years. At the age of seventy-two the Advent of WhatsApp wove my Lavender Codicil.

Written as biography, the author's loosely chronological mosaic of memories chart her search for beauty in a broken world. Rejected by her mother at birth, abandoned by her father, life compelled her, an unworldly misfit, into the world. Cats, roses, saints and synchronicities led her to Dom Bede Griffiths and Mrs Irina Tweedie, two luminaries who formed the healing core to her Self. Timely appearances of Dame Judi Dench over a number of years inspired her to dispense with her dhoti and kurta and continue wandering the world, dressed divinely, in search of the Divine Mother and, in obedience to the task set her by Father Bede, the Black Madonna.

Book Two takes up the thread: seeing Tiger, meeting sister. The unexpected advent of a mobile phone, and the discovery of WhatsApp, changes Anna's life again. At the drop of map she returns to India at the age of seventy-two to undertake a lavender codicil, a road trip around the foothills of the Himalayas in the Shadow of the Devi, with the Taxi Driver. In the final chapters the author, now an uppity woman with opinions, speaks of her passion for Earth. Her challenging analysis reveals the numinous presence, pre-Reformation, of the Divine Feminine found in mediaeval Catholicism, the loss of which contributes to the bedrock of contemporary ecocide.