Flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest

I've learned things today. One slightly alarming fact from the evening news is that Himself and I belong to only 6% of the people of the world who are old enough to have lived through the end of the last reign of the British monarch and the beginning of the next, and I have to say that watching telly right now is making me feel rather ... old. 

Another oddity is hearing, already, much talk about the King. Not just "the new king" or speculation about how he'd turn out - it's just the everyday use of the term, suddenly among us again. And I'm learning a bit about myself, because I wouldn't have thought I'd be especially interested, and here I am discovering a wonderful service in St Pauls on the telly I switched on to hear the king speak to the nation (extra photo), meaning I was glued to said telly for the next hour. There is nothing like the church ceremonial exquisitely carried out for these solemn occasions, and the knowledge that this excellence in worship is there all the time only underlines how much would be missing were it not. (I'm not talking about belief here, because tbh there's not much someone can do about that if they're not needing to.) Anyway, the music was wonderful and familiar in that I've sung quite a lot of it, and the liturgy was perfect, and the PM didn't wear clicky heels to walk over the marble floor to the lectern and that was a good thing too. 

The King's address was such as to create an understanding that he'd be fine as king. As I say, I'm not someone to go and sit for hours to wave a flag at royalty, but this was a sensitive and thoughtful speech and he ended with a bit of Hamlet, so that was good too. (The Leader of the Opposition quoted Philip Larkin, so it was a good day for poetry.) It was a day for which so many organisations - church, visual media, military, security, newspapers - have planned for years; the bits of it I saw were evidence of that. (And there was some cracking writing and design in print newspapers. Just saying ...)

I didn't spend all day with square eyes. I hung out two washes in hope and the blue skies duly arrived, though there wasn't really much of a drouth. When I was doing this, I heard the bells, and realised that the churches around Dunoon were all tolling simultaneously from 11am. It felt very solemn. I did my Italian lesson. And in the afternoon I had a good, leg-punishing, cardiac-boosting hike above Innellan with my pal, where I've not walked for several years and where a reservoir has vanished to be replaced by a burn purling down a gully. You can see from the photo that one side of the track, harvested a few years ago, is now replanted with little trees; the right hand side is a sort of teenaged forest now. We walked about 5 miles, half of which was relentlessly uphill; now my hip is screaming gently and I'm hoping it doesn't keep me awake.

Footnote: Having kept a conventional diary for some 65 years, I am experiencing the usual tension between reporting on current events and telling what I myself was doing. I reckon both are interesting (where were you when Kennedy was shot?) so I'm going to go on talking about the Accession and so on because I think it's one of the interesting things about diaries when it comes to future readers. Not that I'm going to leave my paper diaries for my descendants to read - they're practically illegible to me these days!