Night and day ...

Sorry - I don 't know about you, but I've just given myself an ear worm, all the more irritating because we sing an arrangement of the song and it's the alto part that keeps coming in ...

I am practically incapable of thought or anything else tonight because I wrecked myself in the garden this morning. Our front garden is only pleasant up till midday, after which the shadow of the house eclipses it and in the weather we're having just now the cold air from the North-east then makes it miserable, so I marched out in the morning, armed with a collapsible bin carrying long-handled loppers and two pair of secateurs, one sharp but not intended for heavy pruning and one less sharp but sturdier, along with my heavy duty gardening gloves - all to tackle a single clump of rosa rugosa beside the path. When we bought this house - and I've just realised it must be almost exactly 50 years ago that we came to view it, as the deal was confirmed by our solicitor on the phone while we were visiting my parents in Glasgow in the Easter holiday - when we bought it, the dividing line between our garden and the next was a rustic wooden fence and a row of spindly rosa rugosa plants, and the man from whom we bought it begged me to give the roses a chance to grow as he'd not long put them in. 30  years later they were taking over the path and we had them all taken out and the path relaid, and I saved one plant as a memento and put it in the grass opposite and now every year it's the bane of my life and takes me a whole morning to tame. It's the kind of back-breaking height like when you pack for a holiday and hover over the bed where you're folding your clothes and there's nothing quite like it for finishing me off. But the sky was blue and the sun warm and I had to take off my jacket ...

After that, I was fit only for lunch. Himself went off to church to practise again - his second bout of the day - and I sat in the back garden in the sun and read. I made a batch of soup and stupidly used the last of the onions (Himself had to do a mercy dash for more when I needed one for a risotto later). I wandered along the lane to look at a forsythia and take a photo. I was so tired I didn't know where to put myself - so when Himself came home we went for a walk, just as the sun went behind the hills, down to the shore. That's where I took the extra photo because of the beauty of that distant pink sky down the Firth towards Ayr - but getting back up the hill drove all thoughts of beauty out of my head.

We had dinner, we attended online Compline ( it was absolutely lovely this evening - I love the prayers, and the leader this evening reads them beautifully) and I was just leaving the study after it when the Aurora Watch popped up on my Apple Watch and sent me back out to the back garden in time to take the photo above. The night was fabulous with stars and that faint purple and green arc above the houses and I felt better. 

But will I be able to get up briskly in the morning?