Not surprisingly, working for the church means reflecting on my own attitude to it and to faith.  It’s interesting that in spite of, or because of, the loud voices of Dawkins and his like, titles like ‘God is Back’ and ”The Case for God’ have appeared.

I’ve recently learned that the meaning of the word ‘believe’ has changed.  We use it now to mean assenting to a set of propositions but it used to mean something like ‘I am loyal to..’ or ‘committed to..’.   Karen Armstrong is one of those who point out that historically the world religions have been about practice, about following a way of life.   It is Western post enlightenment thinking that has sought to measure talk about religion or spirituality by scientific method and understandably found it wanting.  And as any good scientist will tell you, the scientific method  is about reducing uncertainty, not about certainty.  My heroine in that field is Jocelyn Bell Burnell who said that she found the concept of ‘understanding’ to be more useful to humanity than the concept of ‘truth’.  In a puzzling world, I’ll be grateful to catch any glimpses of understanding that come my way!

I’ve also discovered the joy of audio books while I’m driving.  I’ve always found that speech radio passes the time better in the car but reception is poor in the wilds of Argyll.  CDs of Alan Bennett reading his own work are the answer!  If you haven’t read or heard ‘The Uncommon Reader’, waste not a moment before doing so.  Hilarious.

I’ve written before about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.  Will have to wait longer for the sequel because a trilogy is now evolving.  Laughed my socks off at Fludd and had to pick myself off the floor after ‘A Change of Climate’.  Only try this if you’re feeling fairly strong.  Can’t say I was but I don’t regret reading it.  An example of the ‘purging of pity and fear’ that is catharsis – and not a weak sentence anywhere.  Maybe keep it for the longer and, maybe, sunnier days!

What are you reading?

I am working by candlelight just like Dickens – the candle that is, not the writing. It was fascinating to hear comedians and senior lawyers appreciating Charles D on Armando Ianucci’s prog last night. No telly tonight then.  Will the lecy come back in time for this to be posted? It’s been out for 9 hours now.  Fortunately I have a gas fire and hob – the luxury of being able to have a brew!

But someone please explain to me how it is an improvement to have landline phones that don’t work in a power cut. I’ve unplugged and reconnected my clockwork phone but then can’t ring folk whose lecy phones are dead.  Could ring mobiles of course – unless, like us, they have lost both signal and battery power.

And talking of battery, it will soon give out on the mini laptop here. I did some work with pen and paper this morning to conserve, but blogging, even if it can’t be posted, seems to need a keyboard…

Chunks of masonry lie around Rothesay and a boat washed up on the road at Port B.  I can be well informed about N Ireland owing to the fact that my (battery) radio is picking up Radio Ulster instead of R Scotland. Weird.

Darkness is falling around me.  Time to get the stovies going.

Wednesday

Yesterday evening (after the stovies) listened by candlelight to a Radio 3 recording of live Prom – the Mariensky Theatre orchestra playing the entire 1895 score of Swan Lake.  Went to bed at 10 and was wakened at 11.30 by the freezer beeping like a reversing lorry, the signal that the power was back and the freezer was unhappy at being too warm.  But only for 15 minutes.   Intermittent reconnections -and beepings -have gone on until about 12.30 today. Yes, it can be restful relaxing by candlelight but hard to maintain any motivation to work when shifting between emergency and normal mode.  When the gloom descends again – because daylight is an over-generous description of the conditions – I just want to go back to sleep.  And avoid thinking about the fact that half the roofing is in the back green.

As ‘U. A.’ put it, she turned to the animals and bit players in the story when she had run through the main characters in the story.  ‘What the Donkey Saw’ is just one of such. Not sentimental, but thoughtful and droll.

Her partner Rose who survives her, reminisced about the banda on which they reproduced the early cards.  Some of us can remember the purple ink on our fingers and the spirity smell!

If you’ve a half hour in the kitchen or decorating the tree, listen to it on iplayer.  It’s a treat!

I had a fun time reconnecting with my publisher and fellow authors.  Shocked though to realise that ‘How to Stop Flogging a Dead Horse’ came out in 2006. Have promised to send suggestions to the commissioning editor.

It was quite bizarre to be transported from power cuts to a wine bar in Norwich and thence to doing Advent stuff with the Vicar of Wangford.  This included singing evensong in a thatched church, standing opposite my sister (said vicar), me being the other half of the two person choir.  The splendid organist sang along and the congregation of half a dozen or so seriously elderly folk joined in heartily.  How, we wondered, had the journey of our lives,  sometimes lived half a world away from each other, brought us to this moment?

Short of hiring a helicopter, I’ll get off the island if I can but one of the advantages of advancing age is that you know ‘this too will pass’.  At the risk of sounding more philosophical than I actually manage to be all the time, I do get less worked up about my own plans being disrupted.  I hate to let anyone else down but then they too have their own version of the zen of hailstones to work out!

Yesterday, I joined two meetings by phone conference because icy roads precluded driving.  Business done and still home and cosy.

Well, the dedicated writing time has come to an end.  The work that pays needs to be resumed, albeit till I go on holiday in a couple of weeks.   When I get back, it will be full steam ahead workwise.   I plan to stay in touch with the writing task by regular short bursts so that, even if progress is slow, I don’t lose momentum entirely.

I’ve been lucky with the weather here.  Yes, really.  We’ve had quite a bit of sunshine so I’ve enjoyed a walk in the evening and even a couple of dips in the warmed shallows of Bute’s sandy beaches!

I guess I need to keep blogging if only for myself -  in case I don’t ‘remember it well’.

There is a huge amount still to write and only then does the  restructuring and editing start.  Sigh.   Why do it?   Good question.  Some writers say they just can’t help it, that writing is simply a way of being.  Others find it agonisingly hard but still feel impelled to do it.   I’m somewhere in between. When I’ve worked hard and produced something, I feel sort of cleansed, the way you do after a good cry.  As the song goes ‘don’t explain’.