A synod and a rainbow

I sometimes look back over the past year and a bit, and realise that the last time I was in church when we could have the wine as well as the wafer at Communion was in the Cathedral in Oban, at the Synod Eucharist. Three weeks later our churches were closed and life seemed to ... stop. Today the Synod met, on Zoom, two months late, with a new bishop - the first to be elected by an online meeting of the Electoral Synod. In a scattered diocese like Argyll and The Isles, one of the good bits about Synod in normal times is the socialising, as we meet old friends from the islands and the other areas to the north of us, having dinner together, talking both facilitated at tables and randomly like normal people. Done like that, the whole caboodle covers two days and involves hotel stays - all good clean fun. Today's meeting was  much brisker affair; refreshments were taken off-line; I had toast and a banana instead of a three-course meal. My photo shows our new Bishop Keith in the chair; he promises he will meet everyone in the flesh as soon as he can. He has, of course, met many of us before, at Synods since 2012 - but it doesn't seem to have put him off...

My extra photo shows what I did with the remains of the day, meeting my pal Di (who was also at Synod) for a revitalising canter through Benmore Gardens. (Neither of us takes kindly to sitting in front of a computer for hours). There were more people than I'm used to seeing, though this could have been a result of the earlier hour. We compared notes and discussed what "good news" we could share with the diocese - something we'd all been asked to do. We felt we have plenty going for us in our neck of the woods. 

The extra shows a wonderful low-flying rainbow over the formal garden, which appeared as we were coming down the last bit of the hill. A sign of hope, as Bluebell remarked the other day - I'll tag it onto the news that the vaccines seem to be effective against the India variant, shall I?

Ridgeback and others have mentioned The Pact on the BBC - I watched the second episode this evening and am well hooked by the reactions of the four main protagonists to the situation in which they find themselves. I think it must be the cathartic effect of their shared tension, which is very well done indeed. Another discovery on live telly this past week has been Domina, on Sky - it plays right into my teenage obsession with Latin and Ancient Rome, and gives a real sense of the times in ways I don't expect of a TV drama. 

The night was a dark place in the ancient world ...