Stretching and poetry

I was too hot last night! When I woke, it was raining - perhaps I'd been hot because there was more cloud than there has been for a while overnight: it's certainly chilly enough tonight. By the time I left the house to go to Pilates the rain had stopped, relieving me of the trauma of turning up in wet leggings - can't think that would have done me any good at all. We did a great deal of stretching today - the air was full of grunts - and ended with two consecutive elbow planks (I managed 30 seconds for each). I was slightly apprehensive about how I'd feel once I got home again, but actually it really seems to have helped the sciatica and all I felt was exhausted. 

I did a great wodge of Italian while Himself was at his class, though I kept trying to fall asleep. After lunch, however, I gave up to that impulse and dozed slack-mouthed over the Sunday paper even after Himself had gone off to practise the organ for a bit. We went out together when he came back - bought batteries for our Air-tags, which had sent us messages saying they were running out of energy (like me!). He managed to get his own one changed, but neither of us can get the back to stay on in mine - it's very fiddly. May have to wait till I'm in the Apple Store again. 

It was while we were wrestling with it that the sun came out for the first time all day, reminding me powerfully of one of the poems of Philip Larkin that I used to teach to my senior pupils, who loved it - perhaps because there was so much to write about in it, or perhaps just because they were young. In it, he mentions the sun’s
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening - a beautiful if poignant image in the context of the poem, which you can read here. * This evening was the first evening this year when we've eaten dinner beside the window with some light still in the sky beyond the candles. 

I've just spent a foolish amount of time falling asleep uncomfortably on the sofa instead of rousing myself to go to bed, and now it's pumpkin time again (I'm indebted to blipper Sally for sharing the French for pumpkin; Duolingo does come up with some oddities for our language lessons!). But before I go, I should point out that if you read the Larkin poem and feel repelled by his apparent cruelty, you should know that when he wrote it he was devotedly visiting his mother in a care home. His language reflects his devastating insights into what we may become in the end - though as he died in his early 60s it he never had to experience it. My ragbag mind throws up scraps of poetry quite regardless of how I may be feeling at the time ...

Extra is a collage of photos I took this afternoon of the destruction of the East Bay promenade in the storm: two of the laborious work of reconstruction and one of a long-disused flight of steps down to the shore.