Small town, 2024

There's a line, memorable for its stark simplicity, in Michael Tippet's A Child of our Time, "It is winter". I sang in a performance of this work when I was with the Glasgow University Choral Society, and it comes back to me on days like this. The rather bleak photos I've chosen for today don't really tell the whole story of the first truly cold day of the winter - I've put two rather fabulous ones as extras; they deserve a whole screen each. One shows the eastern pre-sunrise sky, the other, taken minutes later, the view to the north, where the sea appears to be steaming, presumably because it was far warmer than the air. But I've put them there for two reasons, one of which is that I seem to have posted too many skyscapes recently.

The early morning saw me out to Pilates, still in the garish leggings but with the addition of high fur-lined boots and a very fat down gilet, both of which comforting items I had to remove in class, where we all felt it rather chilly despite radiators. We worked hard and laughed a lot, but it is harder when you're not at all warm. Bashed up the hill afterwards, downed a powerful coffee, and set about defrosting the freezer, long overdue a clean-out. (You can't say I don't know how to enjoy myself ...)

In the afternoon I had to go out again, to the pharmacy - surgery - pharmacy again in order to get even more eye drops, and to buy flour, at the other end of town and up the other side of the hill. That's when I realised some things about my current life here. The two photos show the two shopping streets of Dunoon - the main one on the left, and the lesser one where the primary school is on the right. They were taken between 3,30 and 4pm, and you will notice there is perhaps one visible person in each of them. The town is dead - several shops are in fact empty, and the others seem to run on very short opening hours. There is, apparently, no-one anywhere other than Morrison's and the Co-op. 

And yet...

And yet, on this outing that was intended to be brief and efficient, I met 5 people I know, only two of whom were together. I stopped for a chat to all of them - the couple, whom I see regularly; the wee woman whom I recognised instantly as someone I used to talk to in the supermarket when I shopped at later times of the day pre-Covid, someone whose name I have never known, someone whose husband I can picture give or take ten years or so - and here we were, blethering away like old pals about getting old, the attitudes of people our age to being talked to as if we were old, the effect of hair colour ... and laughed like drains. She said I'd fair cheered her up. And then there was a woman in the Eco store, where I buy my bread flour - again, not someone I see often, but someone with whom conversation flowed as easily as if we met daily. And finally the woman - another whose name, whose context even is a mystery to me - popping into a house along our road to check up on it for an absent friend. And more chat - though by this time my head felt it might fall off as I'd omitted to wear a hat (I was only out for ten minutes, after all ...).

And really that's how my life here has always been, ever since I was pushing a pram. There's another life, of course, based round church, and another with choir, and the Pilates one - but out there, in these empty streets, there are still people, and conversations, and lives. 

That's it, really. I felt quite cheerful after all that. 

But isn't it alarming how long it takes the freezer red light to go off after it's been defrosted? Always worries me.

Must be why I defrost it so seldom.