Fare well, Ruth

Ruth would have been well pleased, I think, with her departure from our midst. She might have laughed, too, at the thought that for once I didn't manage to blip on the right day, as I was so tired by the time I got home that I was incoherent. On a day of bright sunshine and sudden snow showers, a mob descended on St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh, filling the massive nave, singing and praying at a Eucharist presided over by two bishops - The bishop of Edinburgh and her old friend Bishop Kevin, once of Argyll and The Isles and now Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway.

It gives some idea of the mood established by +Kevin's opening words when he mounted the pulpit and said that it was the first time he'd looked at a full congregation in the cathedral and been able to say he knew the name of every one of us. "You're all 'Darling'!" he pronounced - and we all laughed, knowing that that was what Ruth would have called us at some time in our lives. It was possibly the best funeral address I have ever heard. (That's when I took the photo I've chosen - I'm sorry about the heads, but I was trying to be discreet.)

Afterwards there was a wonderful buffet in the side chapel - another huge space off to the right of the choir - where there were so many familiar faces that the immensity of the space seemed somehow shrunk to a house for a large family. The place was hoaching with bishops past and present; there were Cursillistas, there were Fahrters (a group of friends, including Ruth, who went on holidays abroad together), there were innumerable clergy. Blipper Sally  took a photo of me with +Kevin, and we all felt that Ruth was surely just over there, chatting to someone else ...

Walking back to my son's afterwards, I felt very keenly the sudden "gone-ness" of a friend who would just have loved having such a service and such a party, all there because of her.

We took our time packing, had some space to chat to our chaps, and left at the tail end of rush-hour time so that we were hardly delayed at all on our drive home over the M8, the dramatic clouds clearly visible dropping their snow showers on precisely-favoured spots. Our daughter-in-law, thoughtful as always, had left a small shepherd's pie for us, intended for our freezer, but we were so hungry when we got in, and so tired and in need of not cooking, that the oven was on and the pie inside to reheat before we got the cases in. 

As I staggered off to bed, I reflected the in the past week I've been in the company of more people than since way before the pandemic. It feels - for now - like a breakthrough. Whatever the outcome, I wouldn't have done otherwise. 

And now I look out over the Firth at the hills to the north, and see that the sun has gone and it's about to snow again ...