Wednesday before Advent

No, there isn't a new day to observe in the church year, it's just me rummaging around for a new title for a blip... though as the lights go up in houses around Dunoon, I do feel the need to re-assert the proper order of things. 

Today began very slowly as has become our habit on Wednesdays; I'm always so high after choir and tend to compound it by eating toast and marmalade at 10.30pm and then sleep less well than usual and feel nothing like getting up in the morning. I've never been much cop in the mornings anyway, not even when I was a child - I can remember drooping over the breakfast table, my father insisting I ate at least half a slice of toast and a bit of bacon to make sure I had something in my stomach. So all I did this morning, really, was go out to the post and to buy some golden icing sugar and marzipan. (I made my own in a distant past, but life, quite literally, is too short.)

The afternoon saw us up at the church by 2pm to rehearse a wee anthem for Sunday, Advent Sunday, in celebration of which I'm being joined by another singer from our congregation with a super voice; it reminded me that the only reason I've been the cantor for the Plague season has been that I'm allowed to sing next to the organist because I live with him and it's easy to arrange rehearsals and recordings. The church was filled with light from the south wall, where the stained glass windows are - I particularly liked the way the colours were projected onto the plaster on the woman at the well window. 

I left Himself practising the organ and headed home the long way, through the graveyard, down the road by the quarry and on down to the far end of the West Bay. It was far colder than I'd realised and I regretted the fact that I didn't have my hat - my head was frozen. But the sea was glassy calm, with the last light as the sun dipped below the hills turning it gold down towards Bute, and a great gang of one of my favourite birds, the ringed plovers, was having a meeting on the water's edge. Another fave, a pied wagtail, hopped right at my feet in a nonchalant way, and I realised how incredibly quiet the prom is before 3pm on a working day.

And that was it, really. A bit more Italian Duolingo practice, dinner at a sensible time, online Compline, the last episode of Shetland - even before they announced it, it was clear there'll have to be another series! And the shocking deaths on the Channel of these poor people who want to come to Britain ... no words for that.

One last thing: did anyone pick up why the BBC News at Ten was coming from the Glasgow studios? Are they trying to woo the natives, or what?