Lightening the darkness...

It's three weeks since we were last in church, because of the way our travel arrangements panned out. I was so tired this morning that the thought of putting on some decent clothes and getting out in time daunted me, but it lifted my mood considerably. The singing was unexpectedly terrific, with a great surge of male voices (unusual these days) from behind me which came from two chaps who are finalising arrangements to move here permanently as well as a visitor who sings elsewhere and two young men who have become recent regulars. Himself fairly let rip in the final hymn (Tell out, my soul ...) so that the Lay Reader who was taking the service could barely suppress her smiles in time to pronounce the dismissal. And the crazy, wonderful Harvest decorations (blipped in collage) included a lurking red squirrel and a mouse at the foot of a birch tree, as well as a robin's nest from the flower-arranger's garden. There's a great deal to commend a good-going church membership quite apart from any spiritual need to attend, and today was a good example of that.

Di came for coffee and a good catch-up, after which we had a lunch of left-overs and read the Sunday papers, which are better than a soap opera these days. Just as it began to get dark the rain seemed less aggressive than it had been and we went for a brisk walk "round the block" - a loose term which today encompassed the West Bay promenade beside a sulky sea and the tree-enclosed road below the church. 

This evening we finished watching This England , recorded from Sky Atlantic, just as news came through that Johnson is not going to put himself forward for leadership of the accursed Tory party. It felt strange to flit from drama-doc to reality, especially when the drama of the last week has been so grotesque. And elsewhere there was the Rejoin march, at which Guy Verhofstadt was a speaker, and we reminded ourselves that Rishi Sunak, seen as the sensible candidate to be PM, is a rightwinger who espoused Brexit...

Enough already. Goodnight!