Lockdown day 15 - Coffee rituals, crossless buns and virtual churches

There's not a lot going on at the moment that's particularly photographable,

as you can see. I take a camera with me whenever I go for my permissible one-exercise-a-day walk, but the several possible routes are totally photoed out now. Even the camera's getting bored. It's a compact Samsung model, pretty old and much used. It zooms its lens out when I switch it on, and it opens a shutter in front of the lens. Except that, now that it's got fed up with being pointed at the same old scenes over and again, the shutter often stays shut, responding only to a sharp tap.

Perversely, it co-operated fully yesterday when I didn't have much to photograph during my afternoon coffee ritual at the end of the pontoon. The coffee and the music were just right, the sun was out and the wind was warm. The evening before had set the tone for Saturday,

and Saturday took the hint the next morning.

Come mid-afternoon, the clouds had rolled in, but did nothing to spoil things.

In fact, they enhanced the view.

What was missing was the birds. One lonely moorhen pootled around aimlessly.

The off-duty swan graced me with his presence. His missus was curled up on their eggs at the other end of the marina. 

And a few lacklustre ducks came as close as they needed to to see that I wasn't about to feed them.

The tranquillity was magnificent.

I'm not having an outdoor coffee ritual today. Grace has just finished baking some hot, crossless buns; something she'd not tried before, and made without the mixed fruit that such buns demand (Co-op's had a bit of a run on them recently) and without the crosses (not that we have anything against crosses, simply that we needed taste and substance today, not ornamentation), but very good nonetheless. I don't fancy the risk of losing my bun to some cygnine chancer (opportunist swan; I'm just showing off), so I'm eating it on board.

It's Palm Sunday today, not that many people outside of the Church know that. Of course, churches and other public places of  worship across the world are closed, but if they were not, churches would have been holding a special Palm Sunday service this morning.

We've been members of Dagnall Street Baptist Church in St Albans for 28 years, and still attend there when we're back at our house. What they've been doing over the past weeks of social distancing is no doubt similar to what very many others around the globe are doing; broadcasting pre-recorded services across the internet. So Grace and I virtually joined with many others of their number at 10:30 this morning to be part of that service. It was superbly done, despite the very artificial way in which it had to be produced. It's obviously very strange not to be seeing the friends and acquaintances who were sharing the experience with us, but it was far, far better than having no service.

Should any readers be interested, the service is to be found here.

Keep well, readers, and please follow social distancing rules.