Grey

On a  grey day, a grey morning photo in contrast to yesterday's. Barely visible on the Firth is HMS Sutherland,  looking strangely old-fashioned in comparison with newer naval ships (she was commissioned in 1997) and making me think, not for the first time, what it must have been like to live here during the last war, when there were booms across the Firth and no through passage from the sea to the upper river. It seemed strangely appropriate on this, the first morning of stricter movement controls in the UK. 

I'm making a firm effort to listen to news only first thing and again in the evening, so the radio is firmly changed to more general topics at 9am - and in this, Radio 4 is much less relentless than Radio Scotland. I certainly don't want to listen to phone-ins of questions and other people's anxieties when we have enough of our own to go round!

Several points in today were devoted to organising food - sending a list to the angel who volunteered all of 10 days ago (seems a lifetime) to do our shopping; making arrangements with the fish van and the local health shop for contact-free purchasing. Suddenly we realise the utter benefit of living in the same small town for all these years: we're trusted as long-standing customers who will pay retrospectively online.

Out for a brief (for us) walk in the late afternoon, to check switches were safely off in the (locked) church. (They were - it was just paranoia). It was extremely bleak; we saw three individual pedestrians, two with dogs. We realised we were beginning to shy away from perfectly ordinary people as if they were zombies.  But the day ended with a lovely accidental meeting online with a friend who, like me, had mistaken the day for an online service of Compline. It's a novel thing, really, to drop into an online room and find someone there, waiting ...