Paddle steamers and prayer walks

It's been a greyish sort of day until evening; when we emerged from choir at the back of 9pm the sky was clearing and the clouds edged with gold and all the flowers in our garden took on an intense glow. But the day began for me reading a wee column from The Scotsman and realising that this was the day of PS Waverley's epic transfer from the Firth of Clyde to the west coast for some touring there before she returns to the Clyde for the summer. The editor of said Scotsman is an enthusiast, and was on board as the ship left Glasgow at 7.30am, so by the time I was at breakfast my Ship Finder App was showing that they were rounding the Tail o' the Bank and before my second cup of tea I was upstairs hanging out the window taking photos and that's what the photo above is. (We could actually make out son and wife with binoculars; happily they couldn't see me in my Kat Slater dressing-gown ...)

That done, it was time to meet a group from church for a prayer walk through the town - something I've never done before, but a good and visible sign of a church which is rather hidden on its hill at the back of Dunoon actually engaging with the community. We began at the grammar school and finished in the West Bay in the coffee shop to top up on caffeine, having stopped along the way at the hospital, police station, a local surgery and so on. 

Home again, I put a loaf on to bake for supper - something strange happened to the programming so I worried for ages that it might not bake properly, but all that happened was that there was no pause for me to put seeds in - before making our main meal, consuming it and subsiding into a chair with the Sunday paper. Then there was choir and the usual moribund torpor before I summoned up enough effort to come upstairs to bed.

Footnote: Waverley arrived in Oban at 9pm, having passed through thick fog in the Sound of Jura and having had to wait for a CalMac ferry to do ... something. Son was reflecting on the irony of a 75 -year-old museum piece powered by obsolete technology doing a steady 17 knots while various modern ferries languish in dry dock ...

I'm glad they had such an epic day.