Next year's snowdrops already

The huge storm front which has brought so much extra rain from the west this past few days has blown over during the night. I woke up at half past seven to an overcast sky with the prospect of occasional showers. It's surprisingly mild for late December at 12C, symptomatic of climate change.  After posting a link on Whats app to today's Morning Prayer video on YouTube, Listened to Thought for the Day, then fell asleep again for another three quarters of an hour.

After breakfast I went to St John's for the Mass of Holy Innocents' Day. There were four of us with Fr Dyfrig. He told us that he'd been asked to take a Welsh language Eucharist at the Cathedral, but had been double booked which relieved him of an extra duty. 

It seems a little chaos creeps into arrangements rather easily the more means of communication are available. SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, email, plus voice messages and live calls, which are less popular. Some senders may want to be sure of a message getting through and send it out on every channel they can think of. The problem is that with several possibilities of receiving a response, and the reality that recipients reply to messages at different paces, a response may be missed, as sender and recipients may have different expectations. We've created a new problem, now that we rely less on simply speaking to each other.

I cooked lunch, and fell asleep in the chair afterwards. As the pressure has eased after a demanding Advent and Christmas, I seem to need even more sleep, as I might do when I'm on holiday. Hopefully it's doing me good. I walked to Blackweir to check the water level. It was about fifteen inches lower than last night, though still higher than normal. On my way to the river past the stables, I spotted the first snowdrops and a crocus with a full sized flower about to open in the grass verge at a place where the first come out each year. Something about the ground in that spot seems to encourage early growth. 

I checked my photos from January this year, taken on first sighting, and realised this winter's flowering comes a week earlier. My phone's weather app says today's air temperature is four degrees higher than the average over previous years. It's been violently stormy all over the country lately with snow in Scotland,, but there have only been strong gusts of wind here this past few days.

Before supper I started a batch of dough, and left it to raise. When we'd eaten, I prepared the text for next week's Morning Prayer and Reflection ready to record, then knocked the dough back and put it into baking tins for leavening before baking. I joined Clare watching a delightful documentary about the Coronation while the oven heated up. By the time the bread was baked, Clare was on her way to bed. Once the house became quiet, I took the opportunity to record next week's Morning Prayer and Reflection, ready to edit tomorrow, and then turned in for the night.