Doing what we do

At some point during the past year my oldest grandchild persuaded me to download an app called Be Real, which prompts you to "be real" with a message on screen at a different time each day. I don't know if that same time is applied to everyone who's signed up to it or if it's only a group of friends who have to leave what they're doing and take a two-way photo - of what is in front of them, but also of themselves or whatever they manage to direct the inward-looking camera onto - and post it, with or without a caption. This then allows you to see the Be Real posts of your group of friends ...(bear with me) ...which in my case is made up only of said granddaughter and her father/my son (which is the joking description she likes to use when talking to me about him). When the grandchildren were small, we were for ever seeing shots of them on holiday, but now they have vanished into the mists of adolescence such opportunities are few and I rely on the ridiculous BeReal photos (which vanish after 24 hours) for evidence that they're still there.

That absurd story is by way of explaining that the only photos of today are either BeReal moments or this one photo from church which is my blip for today. I took it this morning from the back of the church, where I seldom sit, at a memorial service for a woman who came to us but also attended the Church of Scotland with her husband, whom we've known for years as a teaching colleague. The church was full, mostly of people who had nothing to do with Holy Trinity, the hymns chosen by the woman whose life we were celebrating. 

I think being a member of a church community fairly brings it home to you how close the line between this world and the next, when you realise you know as many people who are no longer in the congregation as you do the present bunch, when you see faces you knew in the past changed by the passage of years, when people you taught greet you in accents you don't recall them having and you realise they now live in Australia ...

I was fairly washed out after this - there was a lot of singing to do - and realised that there was also a sense of the dissipation of the last of the effects of the morphine I was given the other night, so that my legs ached in a flu-like fashion and all I felt like was bed. However, I sat in the garden instead and supervised Himself doing his best to prune the Philadelphus, which has grown enormous this year. I did a little genteel cutting-back, but the dust or whatever it is that makes me cough forced my retreat. 

Despite initial misgivings I enjoyed Himself's curry immensely and spent the evening dozing over World on Fire and wondering if it was gripping me sufficiently to go on with it. 

Onward and upward ... shall I launch a publicity drive about the possible effects of mycoprotein?