Plus ça change ...

Today was amazing. Perfectly blue sky, little wind, sun that actually had some heat in it - and I was almost too busy to notice. The day began, as usual, with Pilates - a small class today, which always feels to me as if we work harder. I was certainly grunting a good bit ... The car parking situation, which we had hoped was better after some tarmac-laying, turned out to be just as nightmareish, so I was glad of a friend to run me home and save me a return trip to collect Himself. 

The intense physical stuff had the odd effect of rendering us both rather unhungry at lunchtime, so we ate very little and instead tried to relax. I even had half an hour in the garden, in a sheltered corner, to do my Italian before two of our musician friends arrived to practise for special Holy Week music. The four of us made sweet music together, so it was an enjoyable 90 minutes before I had to scoot upstairs to the study for a Zoom meeting, again to do with church affairs.

By the time the meeting and the follow-up were over, I just had time for a quick walk - about a mile and a half - before dinner. That's when I took both the photos in this blip; the first is of the old Parish Church, the High Kirk, which is now, sadly, relegated to a secondary place in C of S planning for their premises in Dunoon, being used in conjunction with other churches in the area under the name "Cowal Kirk" - for which, incidentally, it seems impossible to find service times or locations with a simple online search. Maybe it's too late at night ... The building, and the gardens in front of it where I was standing, are the first thing visitors to Dunoon see if they come off the pier - though of course that too is more historical than anything else, given the state of the CalMac ferries and the town pier. (Sorry: local rant over). The blossom has just come out on the trees at the edge of the gardens - must be spring right enough. 

My extra photo is of the wall of the High Kirk where it adjoins the old road up beside the original town wall, and shows two memorial stones presumably inserted into the wall when the church was built. Wikipedia has this to say: The church was completed in 1816, to a design by architect James Gillespie Graham of Edinburgh, built near the site of an earlier, 15th-century parish church, the Bishop's Palace, which became the Cathedral Church of both the Roman Catholic and Episcopalian Bishops of Argyll.[2] In the late 18th century, this building became dilapidated and was demolished, and the stone used to build the current incarnation. However, what I find interesting is that Robert Bouckles saw fit only to inform us that the stone was in memory of his spouse - no name given: presumably she was only important through marriage ...

Enough. We have a new leader for the SNP and - unless something untoward happens - a new First Minister: Humza Yousaf. Elected as the continuity candidate, he promises to carry on Nicola Sturgeon's legacy. The Greens are in self-important mode. Nuff said.