Time ...

There were plenty of jokes about how to put your clocks forward this weekend, including the instruction to move your sundial pointer one house to the left ... This sundial is on the top of one of the old gravestones in Holy Trinity churchyard, and though I've always (well - for 44 years always) known it was there, I've never walked the few steps off the car park to look at it. So I never saw the little Celtic cross holding up the gnomon, never noticed the thistle and leaves between it and the angle. The dedication is on the right - so the date is 1931 - and there is a rose and a thistle in the left-hand corners.

After that my observations fail, however - I've never been very good at reading a sundial, or applying whatever formula gives you the time as distinct from solar time. It was about four in the afternoon when I took this, and I suppose there are ways of looking at this that would bear me out - but I shall content myself by remembering how peaceful it was as I took the photo, how beautifully the birds were singing, how springlike it felt in the sun.

Time passes. Today is Palm Sunday, bittersweet and ironic; in a short week it will all be over - Gethsemane, the Passion, the dark of Holy Saturday vigil, the Easter Alleluias. And the sundial will still be there.