Bibit iterum arcus ...

I'm sorry - doing a Boris Johnson here with a bit of edited Plautus, but it leaps to mind every time I see a rainbow ("Look - the bow is drinking; by Hercules it will rain today") Actually it was dry all morning, so that I was able to scamper along the lane (slight poetic licence) to where my friend who gives me a lift to Pilates was waiting clad in my leggings and fleece top; not a pretty sight, I'm sure, but handy when I got to the studio. Pilates class was quite tough today, not least because I was feeling wabbit after my flu jag on Saturday. Both the friend and I have identical red, puffy rectangles on our upper arms, about two inches by one, which seems odd but didn't stop us doing heroic planks. One woman in the class achieved a local ultra marathon at the weekend, so she was groaning at some of the stretches while the rest of us marvelled at her fitness.

After that my day slid somewhat downhill, though there was a lovely moment when the post brought an original slim volume of R.S.Thomas' Pietà, a present from a friend whom I met online and subsequently had lunch with in Glasgow, daringly meeting in front of Dali's Christ on the Cross in the Art Galleries. Since then we've been good internet friends, and he's been an enormous source of learning and inspiration as well as encouragement for my own writing. As I said to him today, I may have the Collected Poems of Thomas, which contains many of the poems in Pietà, but a slender volume like this tends to encourage the careful perusal of every poem in it in a way that a tome does not. I was thrilled and touched.

And that was that, really. After coffee, which I always rely on to pep me up mid-morning, I realised I wasn't feeling pepped up at all, and even a hot shower failed to stop me feeling shivery. All afternoon I felt as if I'd caught flu rather than a vaccination, and it wasn't till much later that I began to feel slightly more normal. Looking it up online, I read that the vaccine given to the over-65s contains some little extra something to provoke a stronger immune response. I guess it's working ...

Realising that Facebook was down, and then Instagram, I wasted far less time than I might have. Instead I did several Italian lessons and hung out of the window taking photos of several dramatic rainbows that came and went through the afternoon - one of them is above. It's almost impossible to catch a whole rainbow through a rectangular window: did you know that? Meanwhile Himself went out for more paracetamol and met someone we've known to say hello to for decades: she told him she'd not be getting the flu jag, and no, she'd not had the Covid vaccination either. 

I don't understand people.