Advent 1

Despite all the efforts to say it's Christmas, it's not. It's Advent. The first Sunday in Advent. You don't celebrate your baby's birth four weeks before you go into labour, do you? ...Oh. And despite the intensely gloomy start - heavy cloud over the firth, snow on the high ground across the water and - once it was light enough to see - on the hills behind the town - it was a radiantly beautiful, perishing cold day of sun and blue sky. 

Our church celebration of the day was lovely too. We had a good turnout, we had the first candle of the Advent wreath lit, we had glorious music (Himself sang the Advent Prose;* a pal and I sang This is the truth sent from above during the communion; we all sang Lo He Comes with a great, triumphal organ accompaniment) and we all went out, somehow, noisily. In a good way. It was joyous; I've added a collage from the service as an extra just in celebration.

Because it was so lovely, we actually managed to get out for a shortish walk before the sun went down - the second time we've managed this! It turned out to be a rather longer outing than I'd intended, as we met first our former boss, disporting himself agilely with his grandchildren in the seaside playpark. He recovered from his antics by leaning on the fence and we ended up having a big catch-up chat with him and his son. By the time we moved on, the sun had left the West Bay and we scuttled round the back road to home, stopping again for a chat with a youngish man in the lane who turned out to have been in our younger son's class at school. Neither of us recognised him at all, but he was so clearly part of that same life we'd just been recalling fifteen minutes earlier ... 

Then I was plunged into a new-to-me recipe for lamb, making a delicious middle-Eastern-spiced lamb hotpot topped with discs of sliced potato, then poaching a huge bag of little bullet-like pears that were transformed by prolonged poaching with a scoosh of runny honey. Then there was just time to phone our older grandson, who was 13 today and sounded more adult than ever on the phone. I clearly remember when we heard that he'd been born, far away in London, and the rush of the need to see him. Advent is not Christmas, but it's full of memories for us.

Blipping some of the Victorian houses along the West Bay, with their great long gardens down to the promenade. During storms, many owners of these properties reinforce their garden gates with bits of wood or metal to keep the beach and the seaweed out of their gardens, but today all was calm. 

I believe tomorrow is going to be insanely mild, but now ...