Between a rock and ...

This has been quite a hard day, though despite everything it was in some ways a good one. The planned part of it, the thing we've been working towards all week, was the funeral of a member of our church, a formidable lady of 91 minus 3 days who managed to live in her house until a few days before she died in the local hospital, a fiercely clever woman who raged against the loss of memory and self at the end, a lover of music who contributed large sums of money to not one but two successive church organs. Her funeral was conducted in front of six of her friends, one of whom was Mr PB the organist and another me, singing. (I'm posting a snatched photo as an extra; it's already on social media so I didn't want a repeat, and it's taken from the sanctuary because I sang from there, well away from everyone else)

I think she'd have loved it. I sang the Kontakion for the Departed; it's at the back of the English Hymnal if you don't know it, as well as here, sung in English. The words "and weeping o'er the grave, we make our song: Alleluia" say it all, really. I also sang Come Holy Ghost, and the metrical version of Psalm 23 to reflect her Presbyterian roots. It was nerve-straining, and it was one of the best things I've done. She was taken from the church to the glory of Mr PB's piece on a Palestinian psalm melody. It was at once the strangest and the best of funerals.

And that was the morning. The afternoon became excessively self-centred with an emergency visit to the dentist, open only for non-drilling operations. I had developed a pain in a gum where the shattered remains of a molar had awaited my current dentist's attention for several years, and rather than let it develop I thought that maybe the time had come to get rid of it. Easier said than done. Suffice it to say that by the time I'd staggered out of the dental surgery across the road and for some reason thought that this photograph reflected how I felt, I was exhausted. Think huge tuggings and much grunting (dentist and me), and little bits of tooth flying across the room and vanishing, and an end result of one root still embedded in the bone - that's how it was. It'll probably need a drill to get it out, and that means the hospital, and ... maybe it'll just settle down again and I can forget it. 

And that was the day, really - the rest has been a somewhat druggy haze. But from near isolation since mid-March, I was suddenly in a position where I was sharing two different indoors venues with different people, one of whom had his hands in my mouth; I found it quite traumatic.

Here's hoping I waken up tomorrow and the kicked-by-a-horse sensation has gone. In the meantime, there are painkillers ...