A wet Tuesday

It's getting harder to find titles for blips - I keep starting on one, and up it comes as having been used before! Actually, despite the title, it wasn't wet all day, but by the time I got out to the bank (after coffee) it was beginning to rain and it still is at 10.10pm (I'm just in). At least the bank was open when I went down; there was one teller behind the counter, one customer ahead of me, and a man in a suit with a tablet slung on a strap like a shoulder bag who approached me to ask why I was in the bank. I told him I was there to buy a crisp new banknote such as I couldn't rely on the machine to provide, and would probably get some grubby money as well and no, I'd not been in for the best part of two years. I suspect the Bank of Scotland may be looking to close its local branch like all the other banks in Dunoon, so I pointed out to him that though online banking was the bees' knees - especially the ability to scan a cheque to pay it in - I worried about the time when I might be too old and gaga to deal with such things and might want a kindly person to give me a hand. I was not soothed when he said they had ways of dealing with that ...

Apart from that and a chance meeting with a friend in a shop, there was nothing else going on, so I returned home to join Himself in dealing with the most exasperating woman on the SSE help phone line. Despite a similar and apparently very fruitful phone call a couple of days ago, the web page is still indicating that we owe them a four-figure sum (we don't - we're actually in credit) and we thought it time it was changed. He kept having to tell this woman to stop talking and listen instead. Bad for the blood pressure.

However, we've just had the first full rehearsal with the choir since we all came back. It truly is 8+1 again - it's been more like 10+1 for years, but we never changed the name - and we're sounding good. Just as well - it's That Time of Year again.

Blip photo is the old centre of Dunoon, with the High Kirk - now, sadly, not in regular ecclesiastical use - at the end of the road past the Glasgow Hotel. To my left is an open area with grass and trees where in the distant past the town gallows stood. The coffee shop was my GP's surgery when we first moved here. It looks just as lonesome as yesterday's street view, but behind me is the unmistakable sound of a primary school playground with the youngest children out for their playtime; the lights are on in the coffee shop, and I'm ignoring the four empty retail units next to the school. Tomorrow I should have another urban landscape to photograph.