Up, up and ...breathe

Whew! Quite a day... It began somewhat early for me, as we were both due, in our separate rooms, at a zoom meeting of the lay leaders of the diocese, discussing our experience of worship over the past nine months or so and beginning to look at what will emerge in the way of church practice when normality returns. (I'm not letting myself think of what exactly I mean by that: enough already.) It's interesting to me that a group of people can meet thus, to discuss the use of technology and the barriers to it, to wonder if it's age or something else that holds people back - to do all this, but to share it using inadequate equipment. There are people whose contributions I don't look forward to hearing because they have such a poor microphone, so that their voice comes across as tinny, or as if they're speaking down a tunnel or out of a deep hole ...

So that was the morning. During the meeting, in a surreptitious exchange of texts, my pal and I arranged to meet up for a walk later. This is the view we reached in the course of what began as a familiar walk up the side of the Bishop's Glen from our church, but ended with a lung-bursting scramble up one of the paths cut roughly by the forestry people when they're planting new trees. We stopped when the path did (It ran into a bog). By this time the sun was behind our hill, but as you can see it's still shining on Dunoon, on the Firth of Clyde, and on the other side - though if you look closely you can see the fog creeping back down the river and hiding all but the tops of the hills to the north. We came down the forest road, occasionally menaced by an unexpected cyclist, talking all the way. And we agreed that if one were to pop one's clogs in such a place, perhaps because of over-exertion of the aged, it might be rather preferable to sitting in a chair just waiting ...

I met Mr PB back at the church. I popped in to ask if he wanted a lift home, or if I'd just take the car (the former). He asked if I wanted a last run through tomorrow's communion piece, and I was just going forward to join him when the news bonged in on my BBC app. Joe Biden will be President of the USA; we will no longer feel we're watching a Hunger Games movie when we have to see his predecessor perform; basic decency and humanity seem to have prevailed. Later, I switched on the telly and found myself watching the Battle of Helm's Deep (the LOTR film), which seemed somehow symbolic of what we've been witnessing during this election.

Finally, we heard of the death of a friend today. Yves lived in Brittany, a scholar of the Breton language and a wonderful teacher of primary school children. I shall never forget our first meeting over a wonderful French-style Sunday lunch, when he engaged our #2 son, now so fluent as to be mistaken for a Frenchman, in his first French conversation about how, when slicing a tart, "le premier coup c'est le plus difficile..." He made a phonetic rendering for us of a Breton hymn so that our quartet could perform Mr PB's four-part setting of it, and sent him a CD of our performance.  We last met some eight years ago in Binic, on the Breton coast. He was as delightful as ever. Today I learned that our quartet will be heard singing Aeled eus ar baradoz at his funeral, at his request. 

As I say: quite a day.