Busy busy

When I was teaching, I often reflected on what an organised existence it was. So organised, in fact, that you knew when you'd have a moment to visit the loo, fifteen minutes to walk the length of the school and get your coffee, maybe 50 minutes when you might decide on what marking or prep you most needed to do. At the time, I would look back on the eight years I spent at home with young children, and wonder at how there was never such a thing as a free period, never any time when I'd know I was free to concentrate on one thing. The two existences seemed to belong in different worlds.

Now, of course, thousands of us are feeling life is in limbo. I've often remarked here how alarmingly it's speeding past: desirable if you long for a post-Covid life safeguarded by a vaccine, less so if you're at the latter end of life and with all the best will in the world don't feel you can really spare time just to pass, unused. (It strikes me that I've borrowed that image: Philip Larkin talks about "time torn off unused", and I used to feel the wonderful percussiveness of the alliterated "t" and think of the perforations popping, one at a time).

All this rambling leads me to the statement that today seemed to have a great deal packed into it and as a result seems to have lasted a bit longer than usual. Waking to more rain, to white horses on the firth, to low cloud hiding the other side of the water, I was feeling quite relaxed about a day with plenty of time to do stuff. Then the stuff started driving me instead of the other way round ...

So: a phone conversation, a FaceTime chat over coffee, placing an order with the admirable Tea Makers of London for some Darjeeling tea (which no-one in Dunoon seems to stock any more), creating yet another calendar, this time with photos of the family - took much more burrowing around for other people's photos because I've not seem much of the grandchildren to take my own pics this year. Assisting with the printing of some music (printer not liking J's system update again), having lunch. Then off to walk (and yes, that had to be my walk for today) up to church, noting that the rain had stopped, in order to record two hymns for Sunday's online service. (One of them was a Big Hymn, hard to sing as a solo voice!). Walked home; joined a Zoom workshop with NoTosh Ltd to see how an international group of head teachers worked together on post-pandemic strategies. Somehow fitted in three Duolingo units, made dinner. (Wonderful whale-sized pieces of haddock, spiced cabbage strips, mash). Then back to Zoom for Compline, then crashed in front of the fascinating programme about the repair work being done on Notre Dame de Paris.

Blipping the clearing sky as I left church (just visible in the top right) to walk home. I took the photo from the middle of the bridge over the raging Blagaidh Burn and narrowly missed being mowed down by a car whose engine sound  was lost in the noise. A busy day - but not a moment to spare for existential angst. Good, huh?