Days Past

Saturday

We discovered our car wouldn't be out of the shop until Wednesday, so Mr. W ordered a rental car to be delivered Saturday morning. We drove forty miles to the town of Wick and spent the afternoon at Tesco(the UK version of Wal-mart) buying staples for the barren manse cupboards. We bought Scottish made cheese, fresh fish, and Scottish honey, among other things.

After lunch I made my first purchase with British pounds: Walking boots. They were originally 50 pounds(bear in mind I exchanged my American dollars for 1 pound=$1.76), but were on sale for 17, which is still more than I've ever paid for footwear before. They seem sturdy and I'm sure I will put them to good use.

Saturday evening we had a church service to prepare for communion on Sunday. This church only takes communion twice a year, so it was nice we were able to be here for a communion Sunday. The speaker was a recent seminary graduate and associate pastor at Rosskeen. He was a very good speaker and other than being sleepy I enjoyed the sermon.


Sunday

We woke up to find someone had planted half a dozen garden gnomes on our garden wall during the night. No one from church knew anything about them, so we surmised a inebriated rascal had filched them and left them on our wall as a joke. Some of the small gardens here have dozens of gnomes and ceramic animals in them. In the end Mr. James from church called the PC(police constable?) and he took them away to the lock-up. We hope they will find their way home.

We had one Church service at 11am and one at 5pm: a total of three services in twenty-four hours. They were all hour long services, though. I'm used to having all three services at once. The church here is fairly small, perhaps fifteen people, and all of them easily over forty. We sang psalms without accompaniment. We had wine for communion, which I expected, but it was quite a bit stronger than what I'm used to. The W's and I all managed not to allow strangled coughs to escape from our mouths. There aren't any children there, and the services are so quiet. Everyone can hear every little noise. There's certainly no ambiance. I missed the crying babies back home(and yes, of course I missed everyone else as well).


We had tea and biscuits after service on Saturday, lunch after service on Sunday(three courses: soup, salads, and desserts), and tea with cakes after Sunday evening service. I thought I might get thinner in Scotland because I'm not doing the baking, but apparently not. I'll have to fast before I leave so I can fit in the airplane seats on the way back.

We walked to the cemetery (I was wearing my new boots) and it was absolutely freezing. The temperatures here are above freezing, but there was a very strong wind and when it's not sunny it's easy to get chilled. We watched the weather and hopefully this week it will warm up. I found the forecast rather confusing: chance of rain, strong winds, possible clouds, hopefully sunny, may warm up, possible rain, more possible rain, more wind, chance of clouds, and on and on.

Snowdrops.