Such music as lives still ...

I need to write this now, loud (how can the written word be loud?) and clear: This was a Good Day. For the first time in ages I felt energised by what I was involved in, and the effects of that energising hour remained with me for the rest of the day, even as the cloud thickened and the mist rolled down the hills and the dire Covid_19 figures reached an all-time high.

It was my poetry workshop wot did it. When I was teaching English, my greatest reward came from watching classes respond to poetry, listening to them develop their insights, finding to my delight that a teenage boy had learned a poem we'd done off by heart simply because he thought it was wonderful (this happened twice: I never asked people to learn poems!). It's the thing I miss most about my work, even after 15 years' retirement. Today brought back that joy, through a zoom class that soon took on the buzz of the actual experience, though the "students" were adults, and many of them in my own age range. And what a good "class" they turned out to be! We studied a poem by my favourite poet R.S.Thomas - one of the learned-by-heart ones, as it happens, and I was able to forget pandemic, outside world and all. Fantastic.

I had, of course, to come down from that before I could sit to eat lunch and then think about some exercise, so our walk was once more in the late afternoon, with the dusk falling around us by the end of it. We went into Benmore Gardens again, simply because we always find it a good place to be in. The mist collected and reformed around us as we climbed to the refuge, and the silence was broken only by the distant burn in the glen. A tiny bird darted noiselessly in front of us, but it wasn't until we reached the pond that we saw any more life, as two mallard ducks glided over its black surface in a silence so profound that we could hear them doing whatever it is they do when they stick their beaks into the water. There was not another soul in the gardens at that hour, and we felt like the last people on earth. 

Blipping the view before it grew too gloomy - across the River Eachaig towards the fields of sheep and the mist lying low in Glen Massan.