Back to earth

We were so early in bed last night - even I put the light out before midnight - that I was awake at 6am thinking it must be time to get up, but I managed to contain myself till a more usual hour because the night had been cold enough to bring the heating on early. That meant that church was rather miserably cold, with the damp feel to the hymnbooks that tells of a cold, dank week. But the hymns were good; Himself and I sang the Lent Prose; my pal Di preached an interesting sermon about the language of the Old Testament lesson (she does Hebrew on Duolingo, as well as Biblical Hebrew in an online class) and the final voluntary, in which Himself was doing his thing and improvising rather spectacularly on the last hymn produced an outburst of applause and even some cheering ... 

Then it was home, along with Di, to drink coffee and eat birthday cake. I fell asleep after lunch, but roused myself to go out because it was a lovely afternoon, and found that it was entirely worth the effort. We walked along Loch Striven watching a heron posed like an old-fashioned headmaster on top of a mooring pier, as well as a couple of other herons (or were they all the same bird putting himself about?) flapping along the coastline. It was utterly still and silent apart from the birdsong that started around 5pm in the woods, and I picked some daffodils growing more or less unseen between road and rocky shore (there used to be four forestry houses on the loch side which were removed some 40 years ago; I always think some inhabitant must've chucked out old bulbs onto this no-man's land and there they've grown since. 

It wasn't until we were driving back over the road that I noticed the sunset sky that had been concealed from us by the hills on the other side of the loch, so we stopped at the Ardyne car park with the sole intention of taking photos. I was had pressed to choose, but I've gone for this one with the pink glow on the clouds, which had been piled high over the mountains of Arran all afternoon. By this time the cloud had thinned and dissipated sufficiently to show off the snow-topped hills, and wisps of pink light illuminated the water below. In the mid-ground are the lights of Rothesay, on the Island of Bute. Curlews and oyster-catchers burbled on the shore and the wet sand gleamed pink - and that was a photo I almost chose. 

By the end of dinner - a fish pie we'd been given by my daughter-in-law - we were both exhausted again. And I have to confess that I'm back to my midnight writing ...