The Collection

I'm just back from doing the Christian Aid collection with my pal Mrs Heathbank. Because we are relatively lithe and active (I know, but that's church for you...) we undertake an area with a hill in it. On the very outskirts of town. This year's collection included not only the hill, and its strangely bleak little community in a new development which is unfinished and half empty, but also some new houses on the shore that we'd never visited before, so the afternoon promised some variety and a bit of interest.

In the event, there was much with which we were all too familiar. The people who had no money (it's Sunday). The man who said "I'm afraid I'm the only one in," and shut the door. The people who had already been given an envelope by their own church (come on, chaps, they're for door-to-door collections, you know - not for an easy way out for all concerned). Less familiar were  the lovely people who gave us these envelopes for our bag notwithstanding, and the people who invited us in for a chat regardless of our hiking boots (you go prepared for anything in this part of the world). Most annoying moment of the afternoon was reserved for four persistent and  very rude small boys who dogged our way round one group of houses making such a racket that we were sure the forewarned denizens of the place lay low as one man. It's the difficulty of remembering that I'm a Christian Aid collector and therefore must bite my tongue that really gets to me in these moments.

And then there were the dogs. I don't care for dogs. Fortunately Mrs H does, and fielded most of them. I had one great success in ordering one beast back into his house; it went, and its owner offered to hire me to complete the animal's training. I declined.

All this time it rained. Most of the time it was a fine, wetting drizzle, with occasional outbursts of something more substantial. As we trailed up the half-made road to the last houses in our patch, we reflected on how different it is doing this sort of thing in a city. I once helped a friend in a residential area of the Edinburgh suburbs; she did one side of the road and I did the other and the whole operation took us half an hour and yielded a heavy haul of filled envelopes. Where we collect in Dunoon, we have to reckon on at least two hours to get round our allocated houses, and will be lucky to have half the amount of the city collection. But I'm not complaining - not really. Except about the churches who make our journey a waste of time.

And next year I'd like it to be warm and sunny. Please?

Silver linings - or simply wet?

This post is for the people of the future. The people who have run out of water, if tonight's news on climate change is to be believed, or who find the temperature has risen by an absurd number of degrees. If they still surf old blogs, if someone has the perverse energy to research how people reacted when the acceleration towards global catastrophe began - this, my friend, is for you.

Because where I live, in this miserable corner of western Scotland, we've barely seen the sun for a week. Every morning we waken to grey skies, and on days like today we have rain drifting in curtains for hours on end. Sometimes it blows on a randomly gusting wind, sometimes it just falls. It's not cold, and it's not warm. It's just grey. And it grows dark absurdly early and when we waken to yet another grey dawn we feel there's no point in looking. We phone relatives - in the South, even in Edinburgh - and hear of long sunny days, BBQs in the garden, walks in the park. And from a recent trip to London I know that the sun shines there and that they actually could do with a bit of rain to clean the streets up and sort the garden out. And from flying home I know that up there above the grey there is brightness and blueness and ... and ...

Today I had to go to the shops in the afternoon. I put on my long mac and trailed about in deserted Argyll Street till I found stuff to take the smell of spilled diesel out of my washing machine (don't even think of asking. Read my tweets) The rain drifted the way it does on a misty mountain top, and there was no-one there. They were all in the comforting brightness of the supermarket, and they were all - all - moaning about the weather, about depression, about SAD coming early, about leaving town, about migrating, about holidays in the sun.

So, dear researcher, that's how we feel, we cloud-dwellers. We feel sad. Sad and damp and irritable. I have one bright spot to report, however:

I saw the moon tonight. It's gone again, but I saw it. Every cloud ....

Dark skies over Dunoon

Dark skies over Dunoon
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Another gloomy morning, the kind of day when getting on with it seems pointless and the book you're nearly finished (Pat Barker's Life Class) calls you to the red chair under the light. I would say I was depressed, but it wouldn't be true, for in depression books have no charm. But I am reminded of wet days in Arran, scene of my summer holidays from the age of 9 months until fairly recently (and I'll be there at the end of this month).

The house we rented every year had a cupboard at the top of the spiral staircase, watched over by two wally dugs - these china spaniels of unsurpassed hideousness. In the cupboard were two shelves of the most strangely-assorted books, among which I burrowed. By the time I was fourteen or so I must have read Dreadnoughts of the Dogger eight times, although there were also paperback Westerns and a hardback copy of The Flight of the Heron. (Does my younger son ever wonder where his Christian name comes from?)

And I used to welcome days like today, days when it seemed unlikely that we would be out for more than a few hours, days when I wouldn't be summoned by holidaying friends -"Is Christine coming out to play?" I would curl up on the step under the dormer window of the front bedroom and lose myself in the lost cause of the Jacobites or the adventures of Sea Scouts caught up in the naval activities of World War 1. I would be so far from the present moment that I would find it truly hard to join others in play, or even the family for food.

And that, of course, is the magic of fiction. Television, DVD, film - none of these has the same hold, the same secret lure to another world. I feel keenly the fact that as an adult I am no longer free to do this withdrawing from the world, and that as an online addict I have distractions which can prevent the immersion which is the true secret of enjoyment. And I shall never forget the time when I realised that being depressed - in my case post-operatively - stops the magic in its tracks.

The photo, by the way, somewhat contradicts the opening message of this post: this is the kind of sudden brightness that would signal the end of an afternoon's reading. I can almost hear my father's voice: drag yourself downstairs - the rain's off!

Country roads ..

Well that was quite a day. It began for me at 5am, so it has already gone on for too long. However, the point of it, the Cursillo team meeting in Perth, was terrific - a great bunch of people, already turning into a family, bursting with enthusiasm and good humour. And when we left the venue at 3pm, it was with the usual injunctions to have a safe journey home.

For some of us, the journey home was merely trying. Torrential rain had caused subsidence in the northbound carriageway of the Glasgow - Perth road; we didn't find the cause until we had already been stuck in a traffic jam for over an hour. We watched the brown torrent rushing past us down the hard shoulder, we cursed the opportunists who snuck up the closing lane or the slip road and then muscled in ahead of us, we were harangued at intervals by the sat nav informing us that there were stationary vehicles ahead. We called it Camilla, by the way, in honour of its posh female voice. (I note with interest how it now pains me to refer to Camilla as "it". Strange.) And all the time the rain battered on the roof and the lightning did dramatic effects overhead.

But we got home in one piece. Father Kenny was not so fortunate. He ended up upside down in a field, having lost control on a treacherous bend after sudden rain. He is unhurt, I'm glad to say, but needs all the prayer support of his friends to get him through two masses tomorrow. His beloved motor is crumpled and squashed, but he is not. I expect he'll blog about it when he's over the immediate effects, but for now I'm doing it. And then I'm for bed. And then ...

A holiday.