Obligatory*

I'm going off Thursdays. Funny thing: when I was teaching, there was more than one year during which my timetable on a Thursday had me saying just that, had me exclaiming by the end of the school day that I was engaged in a silly job and not doing anyone any good. One year, I distinctly recall that my last class of Thursday was my poor S4 class - so 15-16 year olds - who came to me directly after PE and were inclined to what I shall euphemistically describe as restlessness. I was always glad to hear the final bell, and I usually tried to leave the school as soon as possible after it. Other  days I'd happily stay to do some marking, or work with the school newspaper staff, but never on a Thursday.

Come to think of it, it was often the day when I did my supermarket shop for the week. The supermarket at 4.45pm on a Thursday would sometimes seem like an offshoot of the staffroom, and sometimes I felt like a zombie as I leaned on my trolley for support. Maybe that's the key. The shopping. Certainly I was up early today, and actually in the shop by 8am when they put the bright lights on. Nothing unpleasant happened, and I was back in my car by 9am, ready for breakfast. So far so bearable...

I had an enjoyable Zoom meeting with the team who do sermons in our church - two of us like me, with Bishop's licences, two lay readers and the Rector. The lectionary readings are the ones I shall be preaching on in a couple of weeks or so, and I now have more ideas than when I started. (My coffee cup is still here, beside the computer. Darn.) After it I chatted to my pal for a bit on FaceTime, did some Italian lessons on the computer. I downloaded the Scottish NHS Covid_19 tracing app. Then it was time for lunch. 

But instead of relaxing over lunch, we both became stressed about a problem we had to resolve, and this segued into my reading bits out of the paper about ... the Westminster Government. Very indigestion-producing. By the time we thought of going out, the grey day was turning drizzly. We bashed round Benmore Gardens in a far from tranquil state, soothed briefly by several sightings of tiny red squirrels darting across our path with that marvellous springy gait - they are definitely my favourite wildlife. 

Of the evening, the less said the better. It was redeemed by a surprise FaceTime call from a friend in Canada, with whom I share many attitudes. We laughed and compared notes across half a world, until the evening felt rather better than it had.  News at Ten showed the bafflement of European ministers and Tory peers at the behaviour of the Government, as well as a whole feature on the fires in California, which I already feel I know about from reading Wildwood's blips. My friend in Western Canada told me she can smell smoke in the air from fires in, I think, Washington state. 

So, as I blip the pot of cheery last nasturtiums (*I do this every year, I think) grown from last year's seeds, I'm trying to tell myself that our grey chilliness is a blessing, that it's ok for Autumn to be like this (harder, that one), and that everything passes. Trouble is, so does life ...