Good Friday

I'm writing this at almost midnight on Friday while outside, in the dark, the wind is dashing the rain against the study window so hard that the water is washing down it as if the new window-cleaner was hard at work in the night - the one with the hose in his long brush rather than the one who used to climb ladders to wash our windows (rather more thoroughly, it has to be said...) While on matters domestic, I have to add that we still don't have our new whirligig, so it's perhaps as well that the weather is too foul to make me long to indulge my passion for drying the laundry outside ...

There was very little domesticity involved today. We spent the morning organising our future with the choir, setting up times and whether or not there should be an interval in our early autumn gig as well as working out exactly what we're singing in next month's performance. I caught up on my blip from yesterday and had a brief chat with #son. And I reflected on a programme on the radio this morning - a phone-in - talking about retirement ages and how we'd all feel still working at 80 - because it feels as if we're working as hard as ever only no-one is paying us to do it. Better than festering, I suppose ...

As we were due to be at the Last Hour service in church for 2pm, lunch was a rather delicious (and liturgically correct!) Hot Cross bun with an indecent amount of butter before we got off up the road to the bare church, looking more stark in the daylight than it did last night. The liturgy for Good Friday is beautiful, and includes the Reproaches, which last year we were able to sing because we had another singer join us. This year a recording was played over the speaker system - a recording of our much younger selves when Himself and I sang first with the St Maura Singers, in the Cathedral of The Isles, with our two friends who are still more or less running things in Millport and Rothesay. The recording was made in the early 1970s on a tape recorder, and has subsequently found its way onto a CD and thence to my digital library from which I shared it to the chap who does the sound in church ... and there it was. I found it unexpectedly moving to hear our young selves, at once recognisable and different. 

The whole service was beautiful, quiet, reverent. The big cross was carried to the front of the church; some of us venerated it. People left, quietly. Beyond the walls, down the hill in the town, people were going about their normal lives - just as it must have been in Jerusalem two millennia ago. In a way, Blipfoto reflects this disparity, a disparity which has struck me for over 50 years now. We came home and had another hot cross bun...

And now we've seen just a snippet of a totally silly and stressful film about two very young women stranded on top of a very high deserted radio mast in the desert. Happily we missed what lunacy made them do this climb, but the whole concept had me shrieking inaudibly "No!". I confess to having recorded the conclusion; before I turned it off they'd discovered there was no phone coverage ...

All this in one day.