The morning after ...

Actually it was the day after - such a dreary, grey, increasingly windy day, such a flat feeling to have to return to mundane domesticity after a couple of exciting visits to the city. In fact I was reminded of one of the joys of full-time teaching (there are several, but this is appropriate now) - when I was in a classroom full of pupils, there was no room in life for anything else, be it housework, imminent starvation or a basket full of dirty laundry. But today ...

Today I did a washing and hung it out in the bleak blowiness. Today I made not one but two loaves, one after the other (in the machine). Today I organised all the paperwork from the last two days and put them in a single file on my desktop. And today we went for a walk in the rising wind, picking the one place we felt sure would be sheltered, at the tip of the peninsula. We actually walked further than we have these past couple of years, getting all the way to Knockdow, the house and grounds that now belong to a Russian, a friend of Putin, which have been lying empty - except perhaps for a caretaker - since the invasion of Ukraine. 

Today the view had changed - that view in the picture above. A huge tree, which used to restrict the view of the artificial lake and dictate the exact spot for a photo, has fallen, along with several others along the road, and is lying with its upper branches in the water and a great tangle of broken branches beside it. The (very) mature woodland around the estate has been damaged by the gales of this winter, and they currently lie where they have fallen.  I wonder what will happen here?

And that was it, really. We popped into the church on the way home, to sing through the Communion piece for tomorrow, then headed home in the dusk, narrowly avoiding an unlit parked car on our side of the road and an unlit dog-walker on the church drive. He/she lived to tell the tale ...

And now to bed, to dream about a newly-conscripted Citizens' Army and what horror that would be.