Each new dawn

I know I keep posting views from my bedroom window - often, as today, the first thing I see when I surface from sleep. Sometimes I feel, like someone I follow on Instagram who posts the same view of Oban bay every morning, that the differing aspects of the view are sufficient variety - though not on a day like yesterday with its plethora of bright images. But this, with the light breaking through the morning mist and the two Western Ferries sailing along the line of brightness - this is my favourite of all the photos I took today. 

And I need these gleams of hope on the horizon, waking these mornings wondering what hellish things will have taken place overnight in the war zones of the world. Today, three things stand out: a powerfully raging post of a speech by a journalist, Gideon Levy, on Facebook and a heartbreaking image of a traumatised baby in Gaza. The one gives me a kind of hope; the other a blackness.

However, life here goes on as it must: the early shopping, I have to report, is turning out to be an obstacle course under Morrison's new "improved" regime for shelf-stacking which involves cutting their night staff to two and having the morning shift bring out huge trolleys and pallets into the aisles to restock while the early customers fight their way past in an attempt to reach the shelves. And that in itself is a problem - the orange juice I favour is now lined up on the top shelf, which I can only reach if the items are right at the front. I know I used to clamber up, but ...

That done, I had breakfast, Italian practice and coffee in a brisk sequence and sat down to try to add a requested doxology to a hymn I wrote many years ago now. After an hour of banal doggerel and dodgy theology I gave up and told the customer to sing it without - it's amazing how a change of preposition can skew the meaning towards the heretical. A phone call from #1 son raised the question of today's proposed total merger of the two Edinburgh schools, Mary Erskine and Stewarts Melville, creating a non-segregated school for boys and girls, using the Mary Erskine campus for the primary school. An interesting discussion made lunch late - we all have views on the relative merit of single-sex classes vs mixed  classes. I have to say that when I was teaching I chose to take more than one all-boys' Standard Grade classes because of the hugely enhanced learning that took place - I used to say it was because I was the only female they had to impress. The boys certainly were far less inhibited in discussing literature when they didn't fear that they might be mocked.

After all that and a late lunch, we were both really tired but felt we'd be improved by a walk (natch) and headed to Loch Striven for a peaceful few miles along the loch side. It was still and silent and smelling of vegetation, and rather lovely.

My last excitement of the day came with having to fillet a fish. I've gutted mackerel in the past (after catching it in the Holy Loch - probably mildly irradiated) but never tried filleting. I had a very sharp knife, and the end result was reasonably recognisable and rather delicious (sea bream, served with tomato risotto and pak choi)

A brief messaging session with my poorly granddaughter followed, and another lost few hours asleep in front of the telly. Plus ça change ...