What are days for?

If you know the poetry of Philip Larkin, you will now be muttering "Days are where we live" - and of course that's just it. But it struck me today how short my days seem to be, and it's surely not just because I don't get up as early as I did when I was teaching, because I go to bed later too. I was thinking rather of the number of things I used to fit into any given day, moving swiftly from one to the other in a way that seems quite beyond me now. So I would get out to work, having ensured that my sons were with us (all going to the same school in the morning had its drawbacks); teach, fit in a great pile of marking in a non-contact period, run the school newspaper, perhaps staying late to do that very thing, go home, make dinner (maybe even have to go shopping beforehand), eat, perhaps go out to choir (two nights a week), help with homework, collapse in a heap. Now I'll be lucky if I look back on a day and see any achievement other than the basics of food provision and keeping us and our environment clean ...

Actually today I have also been to choir practice (just in from that), been for a walk in Benmore Gardens (where the photo was taken through the woods to the fields of the old estate), and tried to clear the leaves from the back garden path as well as from all over my kitchen floor, where they dry out and drift into corners if you don't get onto them quickly enough. (Yes, we have two doormats, but the leaves stick to the outer one and then detach themselves when no-one is looking.)

And that, chums, was today. I've just had to involve myself in a rather confusing text conversation about the Nat 5 syllabus (I retired when we still did Standard Grade, but I suspect it's a case of plus ça change ...) and my brain has turned to mince. Maybe I'll be more compos mentis tomorrow.