Birds and bluebells

Bit of a morning after the night before feeling about this morning - woke from being drowned in sleep, drank a mug of tea, then sat in bed doing Italian to save me having to think of anything so radical as actually getting up ... And when I did emerge for breakfast, it was to find Himself on the computer checking a piece one of last night's audience was submitting to the local paper, so breakfast was extremely late for both of us. So late, in fact, that it segued straight into coffee, after which I used the caffeine boost to get me out to walk up to church to remove the Easter Garden before tomorrow's Ascension service. 

That's when I got the picture for today's blip - there was a pair of goldfinches dancing along the bushes that line our back lane, and one of them sat still long enough for a photo, which I was thrilled to get because (a) they're not terribly frequent visitors to our garden and (b) when I was a child I was very keen on the little book of birds (was it The Observer book of Birds?) which had a picture of a goldfinch on the front. I'd never seen one in Glasgow, and thought it impossibly glamorous. 

The tidying of the Garden in church, in which Di joined me, was unexpectedly hindered by the fact that someone had ignored my careful labelling of boxes in the hideously damp tower room and had dumped the label and bubblewrap from the Easter figures in on top of Christmas (if you get me) in order - I'm surmising here - to use the now empty box to cart flower- arranging stuff in. Anyway, it was full of muddy scraps and moss and I had a great deal of rummaging to do and swore rather a lot - and felt like an uncouth version of someone out of a Barbara Pym novel. 

Happily the afternoon was perfect. We went for a walk up Glen Massan to avoid the wind which to my mind would exacerbate the tree pollen problem, and found ourselves in a paradise of bluebells and birdsong. The most intoxicating scents lay among the trees and  over the road; great drifts of bluebells stretched up hillsides and down to the burn; a thrush was singing its heart out on the top of a young conifer and in the intervals of its song we could here, very faintly and distantly, a cuckoo on the hillside. Extra of some bluebells!.

Savage breast soothed (for now!) I cooked dinner, enjoyed it, and went to online Compline. Since then I've been asleep in a chair. I'll regret this ...