Living a week in a day ...

I seem to have arrived at the end of this day, after fitting in more than I thought I was still capable of. It began, chillily, with the customary shopping, only more so: my trip to Edinburgh last week took precedence over the Thursday shop, and our return with food parcels and cake led me to believe I could live off our hump, as it were, until normal routine re-established itself. The pay-off was today - a much larger shop than usual, costing about double what I usually spend, so that the check-out lady with whom I share lives every Thursday apologised for bringing the total up on the screen. 

Breakfast was hardly cleared away when we had a meeting - thankfully chez moi - about church matters, including such details as the music for Holy Week and the niceties of the ecumenical Evensong on that week when our turn comes around. That over - along with the last of the birthday cake, which stretched nicely to a bit each for us over coffee - I did some paperwork before a stupidly late lunch (thick vegetable soup I'd found while defrosting the freezer - jolly fine), and tried to catch up on the Sunday paper (I end up reading them all week).

There had been flashes of sun on and off since breakfast, so we were encouraged to go a walk inland for a change, along the Old Road before Benmore Gardens. That's where the photo was taken, showing where a relatively new flood is now a regular occurrence; the water seems to seep down through the soil into a deep hole just beside the road, from which it now floods across the road and along the far side, guided by a line of sandbags, until it goes on its way along a burn which never used to exist. The area on the far side of the road appears to be laid out for more chalets - the spaces look big for camper vans or trailers - so this burn must be a bit of a headache for whoever owns the land. As you can see, we had to take to the woods to get past. We got home without any precipitation, missing by five minutes the most vicious hailstorm I've seen in years.

After dinner I attended a fascinating webinar organised by the Scottish Episcopal Church Group on Palestine. There were about 30 online, including one churchman from Ramallah, one from Jerusalem, and a Jewish Israeli who renounced her citizenship twenty years ago and now lives in Scotland. I learned so much that my brain can barely contain it all; I took frantic notes on the back of an envelope and I'll have to transcribe them tomorrow if I'm to make sense of it in the future. I was proud of the SEC and glad to see our own diocese so well represented, although there was no socialising - the chat function was used solely for questions and comment.

I staggered downstairs after 9.30pm and soothed myself with the final of Landscape Artist of the Year, although I had to pause the recording halfway through to watch the News. And now I'm ready for bed.

So ready...