Here comes the sun ...

No-one could accuse us of having predictable weather these days - especially when the weather app changes its mind halfway through the day! When I woke this morning the wind had dropped a bit, but the rain was streaming down the window and the bedroom felt chilly. By the time our gardener arrived in the middle of the morning to clear a bed just beside the front door (he was using a pickaxe for the final breaking up of root clumps!)  the rain had stopped but the chill air still moving around meant I could barely stay outside to tell him what I wanted and retreated inside without, it would seem, making myself entirely clear. Ah well - I may have to do a bit more myself.

I meanwhile spent an hour booking Loganair flights to and from Stornoway at the end of the month - I can't bear to miss my friend Clare's funeral so I'm just going to go by myself. It means missing one of our final rehearsals for a concert, but they can do without me rather than without Himself. I also managed to find a hotel with some space - at my third attempt - and reserve a single room. I was reflecting how seldom these days I arranged any solo trips; in the days before I returned to full-time teaching I used to travel to out-of-the-way places like Rothiemurchus for meetings of the Home Mission Committee and was once almost arrested in the Ladies' in Central Station on my way home from Synod in Perth ...

After lunch I realised after lunch that the sky had broken out in blue patches and that it was actually turning into quite a pleasant afternoon. The usual madness assailed us and we were off down to Toward in the south, to walk between the fields and the sea with the gorse looking implausibly fulsome and some rather cute little black bulls with their mums. (They are only cute, you understand, because they're (a) small and (b) safely on the far side of a fence.) I took a rather longer walk than Himself, marching off up the farm road with the distant rattle of a woodpecker among the trees, admiring the cumulus that towered up and then became slightly threatening, though in fact it stayed dry. 

We saw a house covered in Union flags on our way home; it stands out here because hardly anyone has decorations up. We certainly don't - but despite all my nationalist tendencies I shall watch the Coronation on the telly, listening to the music (I may have to switch to Radio 3's soundtrack) and looking out for a few (church-related) people I know in the proceedings. I'm amazed at the people camping in the Mall, coming from the USA to do so, sitting draped in flags - but whatever turns one on. I love the music and I love a well-executed spectacle - and I can't think of anyone decent enough in the political sphere who would make a suitable replacement figurehead.  
And it beats me why anyone would moan about the coverage on TV - I don't usually put mine on till the evening, so missing it all would be perfectly easy without my making a song and dance about it. 

And at least I've not had my tonsils out this time ...