In line astern ...

What a contrast today has been in weather terms - grey, chilly, damp, wet (it's raining steadily now). It's even more tempting just to let such a day slide past - phone calls, Duolingo, more phone calls, reading - but I'm trying, after yesterday, to be more positive.

In that I've been assisted today by things written by two different friends - one about the contribution we make to the online worship of our congregation by the recordings we make of hymns, and one completely unexpected in the form of a review online of my recently-released and badly timed collection of poems. Add to that the remark made by a third friend about my blips being a source of light in the dreariness of semi-lockdown and I began to see that this drivelling into the computer as the day ends has a bigger impact than I might have thought. I may not be much of a domestic goddess, I don't knit and I only do spasmodic gardening, but I can write, and I can take photographs; I can sing and I can teach - though there's not much chance of doing that these days.

It's just as well I managed to feel more positive: when we went for what we think of as a duty walk this afternoon, we were startled to come across three crows fighting dramatically over the carcass of a seagull lying on the otherwise deserted beach of the West Bay. It was so horribly bleak that we actually began to laugh; we felt a bit of Mahler as accompaniment might suit. 

We ended our walk by heading up the hill and down via the church grounds. By that time it was raining slightly, and the wind we'd felt down at the shore had disappeared. This morning there had been a feature on the radio about the Year of the *Midge: they were not wrong. We didn't get many midges last summer, but hey: they've been lurking while it was sunny and today they were out in force. Clouds of them. The secret is to stop breathing ...

Blipping the wonderfully precise line of geese swimming parallel to the shore along the Bullwood road, with an extra of the crazy wildflowers in the inaccessible shore area between the road and the sea - I just love the colours.

*Midges. The expert - so I was told - kept talking about "midgies". Some online dictionaries seem to think it's the Scots for "midges". But I would never dream of calling them midgies simply because in the Glasgow of my childhood the word was inextricably associated with midgie-rakers - the men (they were always men) who would rake through people's bins to see if any of the rubbish in them could be of use to them. I used to watch this happening, a small child peering from a top flat window, and can never apply that extra syllable to an insect.