Busy sitting still

What an untypical day this has been - except for choir, which had just finished, and which brought some good singing again. But the rest ... For a start, I was awake before 7am, looking at the line of pink above the Gourock hills in the dove-grey morning sky. That meant an extra 20 minutes or so of inner churning - nerves, not soup! - before it was time to get up and get on ...

But at least I wasn't in Oban, where in other circs I would have been at the Diocesan get-together followed by Synod. I chose not to go this year because of the rampant Covid levels in Argyll and the Islands right now, a factor that is exacerbated by my unwillingness to risk infection when I have a holiday coming up. However, because I do still retain an interest in how things are going (I'm only the Alternate Lay Rep these days) I attended online via the lamentable Microsoft Teams. I have to admit that even online, the usual rule of thumb applied: these meetings are greatly enhanced by the ability to confer in groups, and we were able - briefly - to do just that. (Memo to organisers: always leave the groups to talk longer than you think they'll need).

When it all got too tedious I wrote a list of the clothes I want to take on holiday, using a neat little loose-leaf notebook with coloured pages which contains my holiday packing lists for every trip since 1995. It's interesting to look back - that first page is full of addresses in Brittany, including a flat in St Brieuc that we were going to stay in and had to drive to - and to see what I wore to what places at what time of year. It helps me to remember necessities too. 

When they broke for lunch I went out to buy flour - I might as well be running a bakery at this rate - and staggered home with 3 kilos of it; I gave the fourth kilo to himself. The sun had been shining brightly all morning, but I'd been aware of the wind getting up - you can see with what effect if you can enlarge the photo of the sea that I took from my front door. By the time we were back home, maybe 30 minutes later, the cloud was coming over the hills to the west and the sun had vanished. 

By the time we were going out to choir in the evening the rain was torrential, battering off the roof and washing down the windows. 

And the war? I read a piece in today's Scotsman about bad news fatigue and the dangers of it; I think I'm showing symptoms already. Maybe the trick is to keep worrying - but I don't know if I have the stamina.