Being arty

Continuing with the return to normality, today was the day for painting class and choir, but began somewhat abnormally ...I was dreaming about a bird - about the size of a seagull, but with the colouration of a dove - which was behaving like a dog, laying its head on my knee (on reflection, probably larger than seagull-sized) and woke suddenly to a shooting pain down my leg and a blinding light in my face. The latter was easy - we'd not shut the curtains far enough - but the sciatica, because that's what it was rather than being pecked by a monster bird, was less explicable. I decided that I'd probably overdone one of the stretches at Pilates and then rolled over in the night onto the "wrong" side for me. Whatever caused it, it's been intermittently painful all day and I'm hoping it won't return when I lie down.

My "being arty" today partly referred to the painting class - I'm playing now, with watercolours, experimenting with brushes and effects on a fictitious bit  of scenery which I'm beginning to populate with trees. We did a lot of polyglot chatting too, which is fun in a tiring sort of a way, because our friend J-C from the south of France was there and he's not been persevering with the English chit-chat.  And the other bit of artiness involves today's photo - the red of the japonica in the front garden juxtaposed with the peeling white bark which is a feature of our silver birch tree.

Choir was unintentionally hilarious. We weren't able to get in to the hall - the lock appeared stuck, or broken - so we took everyone back to ours to rehearse. Everyone suddenly burst into unstoppable conversation which reminded me of nothing so much as a class which has been taken out of their regular classroom and taught elsewhere, rendering them instantly as high as kites ...

I've just been outside (at midnight) taking a photo of the moon again - it and Venus are noticeably further apart than they were. It's cold outside, and frost is threatened and I wasn't dressed for dancing at mighnight in the garden…