Calm

After the feeling earlier this week that summer had departed, it was wonderful to have uninterrupted blue sky and warm sun the entire day today - indeed my neighbours appear still to be sitting outside chatting under a rather splendid moon as midnight approaches. This brought on in me the usual urge to wash every towel in the house so that they could all be dried outside, my mania for outdoor-smelling washing now underpinned by the need not to add to global warming.

This was accomplished around my dashes to the sitting room to watch the extraordinary proceedings of the Proclamation of the Accession of King Charles, televised, like so much else of this week, for the first time. I found myself looking at the collection of former PMs, Archbishops, worthies of various sorts, and seeing them in Elizabethan dress, or perhaps the slightly later garb of the Restoration - somehow the dark suits, despite the occasional morning dress, seemed rather dull. 

I had to do a quick pre-lunch dash to the church to practice the piece I'm singing tomorrow, then collapsed in the garden with some cheese and salad and the remains of last week's papers. I even had to do a bit of sewing ... Have I mentioned before how much I loathe sewing?

Later, by now deeved by the conversation from the next-doors who had the deaf and not-quite-with-it matriarch of their family to visit and had to bellow everything three times in an effort to communicate, we went out, down to Toward because I needed to be near the sea. That's when I took the blip, standing at the totally tranquil water's edge as the tide receded. This is one of the places where bathing is possible - beyond the luscious green of the weed, the sand stretches out towards Bute. (I didn't. Not this time.) On the road back to the car, I stopped to admire a small seal doing back exercises on a perilously tall rock - I imagine the sea was higher up it when he began!

Another extra tonight: the dramatic cloudscape over the Firth of Clyde lit by the brilliant moon.