Words for our time

As we expected, today was pretty horrid again, though the rain was mostly not particularly enthusiastic, just there. I spent a full hour in bed awake and doing Italian and drinking tea and pottering through instagram before I forced myself to get up and go for breakfast - I think I was maybe waiting till it looked more like daylight outside. Then I realised I had three things to do before the morning was over: make bread, make soup and get to the post office with a parcel. 

The first task - the bread - was doomed to be done last when I discovered I had only a cup of flour left in the bin. Himself offered to go for it, so I started on the veg for the soup. Then we had coffee and I got ready to go out in the rain with my parcel - and encountered the new reality of last week's Bank of Scotland branch closure. The Post Office counter is an offshoot of the Co-op, being little more than a corridor behind a wall with the counter running the length of it. When I went in there was a queue of five people, and we moved along fairly rapidly until we reached number three - a woman putting cash from a charity shop into the bank. Bags of coins, bits of paper, one woman behind the counter along with a girl heaving bags around. We stood. I got into conversation with the woman in front of me, who turned out to be the sister of a former colleague. Dunoon's like that. Behind me the queue grew. By the time I was called to hand over my parcel the queue behind me stretched to the door and had at least ten people in it. It's not going to work ...

The rest of the day reverted to normal: a main meal around 3pm, followed by my subsiding on the sofa to watch undemanding television recordings. And then, because it was the choir's last rehearsal before the Carol Service on Sunday, we piled into all our Nanook of The North garments and headed to our church.  I love these rehearsals in the empty church, when we're singing at our best and enjoying the acoustic. That's when I took the only photo of the day: the first carol, whose words I wrote a few years ago now but which seem more pertinent than ever this winter, on my stand, looking down the pews in the rather bleak lights which on Sunday will all be dimmed and - we hope - filled with people. We also rehearsed the Coventry Carol, though I found the verse about Herod slaying all the infants almost too immediate to sing. 

When we left the darkness of Kilbride Hill and drove down the road to home, the wildly lit houses seemed to belong to a different planet.