Arranged romantically ...

Followers of these blethers may have gleaned the information that I'm a great admirer of the poetry of R.S.Thomas - so much so that when I saw these sheep, and again when I came to write a title for this post, the same line slid into my mind almost as readily as if it were my own. It comes from one of his poems about the Welsh countryside and the people to whom he ministered in four parishes during his life as an Anglican priest - not easy, pastoral, sentimental poems, but grimly aware of the difficulty of the life and the shortcomings of the land. 

Here's the quote in full: 
Too far for you to see
The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot
Gnawing the skin from the small bones,
The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-Fedwen,
Arranged romantically in the usual manner
On a bleak background of bald stone.


My sheep, not in the Welsh hill country of Thomas's poem but in the lush green of the Ardyne farmland in the south of the Cowal peninsula, attracted me because they looked so perfectly the way I used to paint sheep in first year Art classes at school, and in fact some were close enough to see that they looked pretty healthy ...

In other news, this was a day of getting back to normal - our normal - after our adventurous and lovely weekend. Pilates, bread making, washing, chatting to friend over coffee - all these things take up time, and I realise that lockdown for us was indeed not far removed from normality. But today I've been reading the proposals for Stage 3 of the roadmap that will allow Scotland's places of worship to open for services, and having the awareness that nothing is normal yet reinforced - and noticing the dire warnings against "singing and chanting" (as if chanting wasn't singing, unless you thought it meant something less agreeable).I don't know how I feel about church under such restrictions, about worship in a state of fear - and this in the full knowledge that it's not just about me.

An interesting point to ponder in between bouts of bubbly this week ...

Posting an extra to keep up the spirits (!) - an anniversary gift that arrived today from my sister and brother-in-law.