Coffee and moonshine

Today has been so full of doing and looking that I'm cheating my dwindling stock of extras by failing to make just one choice and having two collages instead. Blame the beautiful weather - cold but perfect - and the photogenic nature of my surroundings - the natural world, in this case, rather than the church hall of the morning - for a haul of 36 photos from today.

So why was I in a church hall on this beautiful morning? Because it was the church's Christmas Fair, held not in our own premises because we still don't have a hall, but in the splendid hall of the RC church in Dunoon, St Mun's, placed right on the front in the East Bay in the grounds of the church with ample parking ...I sound as if I'm an estate agent. Stop. Himself and I don't really go for these occasions, and I never really did baking for others because I hardly ever do it for myself (there's a logic in that - I don't find it something I can just do) - and I don't want any more books or bits and pieces, so the upshot is that we put ourselves down for the washing-up and that's what we did, standing over the sink for the best part of three hours. The hardest work is always at the end, when everyone's clearing up and the dishes, smeared with chocolate, cream, crumbs and used paper cases that have been overlooked and end up floating like small jellyfish in the hot water ... I had my Marigolds on, and my The Godfather apron, and I washed, which meant I didn't have to find places to put the clean crockery. As you may see from one of the photos, we had a reasonable turnout and there was a wonderful, hopeful, cheering saltire of contrails in the sky when we came out.

We went out later too - down to Loch Striven to walk along the shore as dusk fell. There was a tanker at the fuel depot (terrible smell in the still air, but picturesque lines, I thought) and I filmed a heron taking off with an irritated squawk - I think we disturbed it. As we turned to go back to the car we realised it was really getting dark and we were a tad invisible, and we were bashing along just past the base when suddenly I saw the moon rise behind the trees - a magical moment close to the ancient standing stone. Jupiter became visible too, though I've not included one of the photos of it in the grid. We drove home as the thermometer in the car stood at 1ºC.

I was seduced into looking at my first blips, back in the days when I was an intermittent blipper, and found a poem I'd forgotten ever writing, written in 2010 and only ever published on a blip on Arran. I may share it when I have nothing else to say ...