Dunoon evening

What a strangely busy day this has been, even if I didn't feel at the time as if I was achieving anything. It's the Tuesday thing: on Mondays I always feel I have the week before me to do anything I want to; by Tuesday I already sense time slipping away. The showers started after I'd decided that this was a day I could hang out the washing, so there was the annoying business of drying in dribs and drabs till the sun finally came out in time to dry the last lot. Then there was the equally annoying fruitlessness of a trip to the chemist for a regular prescription that hadn't yet been assembled, so I had to return later for that.

One of the drivers for getting on with stuff is the proximity of our first holiday since February's Malta trip, so I galvanised myself to take up a pair of trousers I've stopped wearing because they droop over shoes. Such an operation always makes me wonder at people - and I know some of them are on Blip - who enjoy sewing for fun; I simply become tense and grumpy. I enlivened the operation by catching up with yesterday's splendid Radio 4 programme where three clerics (Richard Coles was one, and Giles Fraser...) talked about death in a wonderfully anecdotal fashion. I saw so many enthusiastic tweets about it yesterday that I was glad to get the chance to listen to it.

The photo was taken in desperation at the end of the day, when I was heading out to choir practice. It shows Dunoon's historic and renovated Burgh Hall, and in the background a tenement at the corner of Argyll Street, with its interesting domed roof. The sky had cleared but for these little pinkish drifts of cloud, and it was very peaceful and still.

Choir was brilliant - Pergolesi, Tallis - and a bit of heterophony from Anuna. We sang really well, and I argued about musica ficta - in this instance a B natural instead of the B flat I've sung for the past 50 years in the Tallis. Esoteric problems no. 7 ...