Lights to lighten the darkness

I took several photos of the moon this evening, in between sudden, battering showers, but decided on this, the usual view caught by hanging precariously from my window, because of the variety of lights on show. To the left there's the bright blaze of the supermarket car park, still open and busy. In the centre at the foot of the photo there are the fairy lights in someone's window - they look garish and frenetic on their own, but it's interesting how they fade into insignificance in this shot. There are the lights snaking along the East Bay shore road; the older sodium ones in town, and the less obvious newer ones further away. There are the lights on the Firth of Clyde - the ferries, and the shore road on the Gourock side and to the north towards Helensburgh. On the lower extreme right you can make out the red lights on the tiny Christmas tree on the coal pier. But riding above them all, dwarfing everything humans have illuminated, there is the wonderful moon, coming and going behind a cloud, cold and magnificent and unchanging since our light-starved ancestors looked out from this very place and longed for the light of summer to return.

Away from this poetic outburst, I was at our local hospital today for an X-ray. It was requested on Monday morning; I had a phone call that afternoon, and was seen this morning. I was struck by how quiet it was - no-one in the waiting area, just a small Christmas tree and some Nativity figures created from objects that were clearly to hand - I shall post an extra for you to see if you can make out what they were. If we need more specialist examinations or scans or treatment we have to go over the water to Inverclyde, which is never quiet, but it struck me, not for the first time, how reassuring it is to have the local hospital to pick up the pieces at the point of need. (It also struck me that the X-ray room was more or less level with where I had a bed in the maternity ward some 40-odd years ago ...)

And this evening Mr PB and I led the singing of Compline for a small congregation in our beautiful, candlelit church. We love singing there, the more so when it's almost empty. The acoustic is simply wonderful. And then back out to the moonlight again - another extra. I shall run out before the year does ...