Good Friday emerging

Another day of wonderful weather - made more poignant, perhaps, by the promise of winter temperatures to come? And the day, of all the days of the year, when someone with a church tradition feels out of step with the world - that feeling so well expressed by Auden in his poem Musée des Beaux Arts - (suffering) takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. 


I was out early, defrosting the car (really!) before collecting the messages in Morrison's freezing car park, rejoicing in only one substitution to my list, home again only 15 minutes after leaving it. Later saw me perched on the little ladder to wash a shelf in the larder before stacking the recently-arrived packets of Jasmine Tea from the London Tea Makers (such a good company, that!) and throwing away several aged packets of such things as couscous and mixed beans, half finished and then forgotten (it's quite a high shelf). After coffee I cut away the ivy on the garden wall that was threatening to strangle the wisteria, but desisted because of the hayfever potential of the dust that rose from it. I have to sing tomorrow ...


Lunch in the garden was followed by an online church service at 2pm - a service for which I really missed church and the silence and drama of the last hour. But as the service ended, we were played a recording of Victoria's Reproaches  which we made with the St Maura Singers in the Cathedral of The Isles in the early 1970s. We sound so young - none of us had children, I hadn't even been confirmed - and I can remember that chilly Friday afternoon when we made the tape, the service over and the cathedral empty again. It was one of these special moments of which I wrote yesterday - the ones you can never revisit.


Then, in what turned out to be an excellent way of avoiding normal life on what is for some an abnormal day, I met my bestie to go and gather some moss with which to create the Easter garden in church. The moss was quickly found and stuffed into carrier bags, which we then tucked under a tree stump till we'd had a walk. We were in an area of the countryside round Dunoon that I really don't know well, a confusing melange of forested hillside and flat farmland leading into a glen I've barely visited in all the 47 years I've lived here. I'm blipping the view inland towards the end of the walk, as the clouds moved in from the north-west, simply because it's very different from my normal haunts and because I think there's a touch of van Gogh in the swirl of the clouds and the pointed conifers. I'd walked 10 kilometres and felt I'd justified the curry J had made for our dinner. 


And the only living creatures we met were the Jacob's sheep we talked to at the start and end of our walk. Good, huh?