If all the year were playing holidays ...

I used this quotation* (from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1) as a comment on yesterday's blip chat, and it stuck in my conscious mind, behind which it has lodged firmly all these 60-odd years since we studied the play at school. As I remarked to Himself yesterday, it's not having things that must be done - or not enough of the TTMBD that will bring pleasure and company in the doing of them. 

So when I realised that today was going to be as unpleasant as had been forecast, I thought it was time to do some work. Himself disappeared after breakfast to practise the organ in the chill damp of the church, so he certainly wasn't disporting himself in a holiday manner. What was I to do? Make soup is what. I like eating home-made soup on a day like today; I like having some in the freezer; the fridge was littered with the remains of the last veggie shopping. So in it all went, along with red lentils, some spices (cumin, garam masala, coriander) and herbs (thyme, parsley, coriander leaf) and some cheat's stock made from a cube and a Stock Pot. It took an hour to assemble and clear up after, and I felt like a Worthy Woman. (I have to tell you the bread was already cooking in the machine). 

Time then for Italian (6 sets), lunch (reading up about the Franklin expedition, having just watched The Terror), and a recording session cum rehearsal for Sunday. That's where the Blip comes from - the view down the church from the archway to the narthex. I've homed in on what caught my dismayed eye at the time, though you'd think I'd be used to the wet that seeps into the building every time it rains at all purposefully. But you can see, I hope, why it's so special to those of us who care about it ...

Then - and this is the playing holiday bit - I went for a walk in the very worst part of the day. There were gale-force gusts that couldn't make up their mind about direction; there was increasingly wet and heavy rain; there were hailstones. I've come home and removed every garment but one - and I mean every - and am blipping before I make dinner, just because I can. The walk took me along the West Bay shore; I saw three people and four dogs (one person had two). I don't know which of us looked the most miserable. But - and this is the essential holiday response of my childhood - I Wasn't Kept In.

Tedious indeed?

*If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work; But when they seldom come, they wished-for come, And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.