Bright moments in a dreich day

Actually there were moments of non-dreichness scattered through a day when rain seemed to drift through Dunoon without our really noticing it - mostly fine rain, appearing as a sudden haze between the eye and the scene, misting the brightness of the morning (extra photo) as suddenly as that flash of light had appeared, giving way very occasionally as evening approached to patches of threatened blue. 

There were flashes of good things too in a day distinguished mainly - for me at any rate - by the drudgery of packing a case and finding sheets and a duvet and kitchen items all ready for a change of scene for a week. I went out after coffee to put in a prescription request for when I return, and was just in time to join the first hour of the vigil for Palestine that's been a regular feature of a small patch of Argyll Street for well over a year now. I'm enjoying meeting with a group of people from a new place in my life, discovering mutual friends, showing them that not all "God botherers" are hostile fundamentalists - quite apart from my need to stand up and be counted even in this relative bywater. 

Another pleasure was finding that my dear friend Father Kenny has followed me into Blipfoto - you'll find him under that name should you care to look him up. But all that aside, I spent the afternoon in what felt like hard labour - rolling up a double duvet to get it transportable is quite a hard job on one's own, and one's husband was out practising the organ. I eventually gave up and went back to labelling the photos of our visit to Herculaneum which I've at last got round to putting on Flickr. It's times like this that make me remember why I take photos - when I return to them, I'm back on these high kerbs, among the amazingly preserved frescoes and the sad skeletons of those souls who perished in the hot blast that preceded the flow of mud that entombed them.

And that was that, really - except for one last, exquisite bright moment which is captured in the main photo. The raspberries we had for dessert tonight were from Angus; they were large and a deep red and totally succulent and wonderful. We ate them with a modest dollop of plain yogurt and savoured each one like the jewel among fruits each Scottish raspberry can be. We felt sybaritic in the extreme. 

And that was today. Back to brevity and phone-written blips for this coming week...