Tail-chasing

All right. It's really late tonight. It's 12.40am and here I am still at the computer. I'm tired, in that sort of staring way - but I feel today has been productive, maddening, interesting and quite extraordinarily sociable. 

I began with a spot of proof-reading after breakfast, breaking in order to get out in the rain to my art class, taking the car because it was so wet and I was so late and then being infuriated because the yellow cones that appeared over a week ago all along the shore road prevented me from parking outside the house, so that I got soaked anyway walking back to class from where I could park. For one reason or another I felt I didn't make much progress today, though I did transfer my original sketch to the proper paper over the lightbox, and applied thin lines of masking fluid to some highlights-to-be ...

By the time I got home it was almost two o'clock, and lunch degenerated into the sinful toast, chocolate spread and banana that we had so enjoyed on a holiday-like evening in Edinburgh. Then I completed the proof reading and marking up (of the church profile, if you're interested) and discussed it over FaceTime with the friend who's formatting it all. I had an interesting phone call with one of my oldest friends (we played together in the school orchestra in the early 1960s) who has ended up doing for our sister church on Bute much the same as I do in ours, a fate neither of us could have imagined in our nominally Presbyterian Glasgow childhoods. 

Another FaceTime from our formatter asked if I had any photos of the current rectory to include in the profile, so that gave me a focus for the walk that by now I was desperately needing. I must have looked like a prospective buyer, or maybe an estate agent, as I took my photos from the garden and the access road - but a chat with the next door neighbour established my bona fides and we parted like pals ...

Then it was home to family catch-ups online about keynotes in Dubai and the announcements on social media that the editor of The Scotsman has resigned, followed in medias res by a phone call from an old friend (another!) for a fascinating look at church attitudes (said friend is a retired bishop) and the realisation that I am not alone in one of my strongly-held but apparently unpopular convictions. By the time that was over dinner was already wildly late, with the result that I sat down to relax just before the Ten o'clock News and promptly fell asleep. 

It's just struck one o'clock. (I woke up and was hooked by a movie ...) The charming Irish EE help man phoned as promised and the internet is a tad better. There is yet another piece of plastic kit in the post to make it even better. It can join the box of wine that arrived today and is still marooned in the hall. My brain is reeling - but I feel I actually used it today.

And this is a Good Thing.

Photo shows the Firth and a Western Ferry in the lurid light of early afternoon when there was some sun amid the gloom ...