Where's our dinner?

I'll start with the photo ... I came into the kitchen this afternoon to start some early prep on our dinner when I noticed the dunnocks on the hedge - not one, but a whole row of them, all staring, it seemed, at the feeder of wild bird seed that I'd noticed as I came in from church was more or less empty. The suet cake was still there, pecked into having a slender waist shape, but tthese wee chaps, of whom our hedge is full at this time of year, prefer the seeds. I'f you're looking on a big screen, check out the face of the second from the left - I think he looks positively indignant. It's not much of a photo, but it did make me laugh (and I went out and filled the dispenser there and then.)

The weather was back to beastly this morning - the sea was pounding the promenade way below us, and the wind tearing at the back door and hurling great handfuls of rain at it with the strange plastic sound of all Everest PVC doors. We had to brace ourselves to pull it open when we were leaving for church, and instead of taking a nowadays rare chance to dress on the smart side rather than my usual gear, I left home in a birdwatching parka over a fuzzy fleece top and my padded winter trousers. As I result I was positively toasty in the cold damp of the church, and able fully to appreciate a really joyous, lay-led service among people who seemed pleased that we'd actually made it on holiday. 

We didn't go out again. We were too tired and it was too miserable. Besides, I had to pack a case again - I'm off to Oban tomorrow for two nights to attend Diocesan Synod and its associated pre-synod day when people from all over our scattered diocese get a chance to meet and mingle and blether. (Our diocese stretches from Lewis all the way down the west coast to Campbeltown, taking in all the Western Isles as well as inaccessible chunks of fiord-riven mainland, so it's important to make it worth the journey.) Packing among the debris of my unpacking was dispiriting, to say the least. 

I intend to go to Pilates tomorrow before I leave, but there won't be much time in between. And yet it's midnight again, because I was comatose downstairs and couldn't rouse myself to come up to bed. Fool.

Thank you for all the nice comments on yesterday's blip - in a way it'd have been fun to have done this while I was still at work, but I didn't even take up blogging until I'd retired. I'll try to keep up on my phone in Oban ...