Candlemas

I didn't know about Candlemas in my Presbyterian childhood - in fact, other than Christmas and Easter and the quarterly mystery of Communion that we were never there to witness because it was only for the grown-ups I wasn't aware of any major events in what I never thought of as the church year, and it wasn't until I was living in Dunoon and a regular communicant member of a church (the same one as I'm still in!) that I experienced any of this. We had a lovely service today, with hymns all referring to the light - the metaphor of Christ as our light and the physical with the candles we all held for blessing at the end of the service - I snatched a tricky one-handed photo just before I extinguished it.  (Bottom right of collage in extras.)The season of Christmas is now indubitably over, and we wait for the arrival of Lent.

The morning was wet and fairly unpleasant, especially when we left the house at 10am, but by the time we'd had lunch the sun was shining and outdoors looked beguiling and we were duly beguiled and headed south to Toward point, for a walk round the point past the lighthouse. That's where I took the main photo, at the start of the walk down the long straight between the fields, seemingly heading to the dramatic bank of cloud which is in fact what we'd had, now retreating eastwards. (The geography is always slightly confusing direction-wise.) The light was beautiful, the colours of the fields warm and bright.

I chose this photo out of a whole batch that I'm absurdly pleased with - mainly because I keep posting pictures of sunrises and sunsets - which is why the collage is there, showing a marvellous rainbow which began slowly and ended up complete over the water; the sunset behind Bute; a palm tree in the playground of Toward school silhouetted against the sunset sky; some birds at the very tips of the branches of a tree, also in the playground, black against the sky where the tiniest of moons has shown itself. 

The only fly in today's ointment, so to speak, was my not reading the tiny print telling me that the duck legs I'd bought had to be cooked for 90 minutes. It's all right - I didn't serve raw duck: I just saw it too late to eat at a civilised time, so I rustled up a speedy - and utterly delicious - shepherd's pie instead. We'll eat the duck tomorrow.

And I'll start earlier.