Spent a quiet day yesterday with the Sisters of Bethany who live, not with Lazarus, but in Southsea. They are mostly elderly and there was a waft of eau do urine about the place, and mixed with incense in the chapel that makes for an assualt on the nasal cavity. The priest leading was called David Lindsay, a gifted and engaging story teller who used Pooh Bear and The Shack in his addresses. I cycled in the rain to Fareham for training purposes, and then got the train to Fratton, and was then disoriented and shivering as I navigated the back streets of Fratton to find the Sisters. The best thing about going on Quiet days and so on is that you are often the youngest person there. I took along a friend who is younger than me, and who wisely got the train the whole way and arrived dry, not literally dripping on the door mat. the youngest nun ( 50 ish - maybe I'm being harsh) came over and said ' I always say a special hello to any young faces we have here.' Hooray!

At lunch time I went into Southsea to buy some emergency boots to warm my feet up, and some emergency socks, and then a paper and had lunch in the pub on a comfy sofa. So it turned into a rather costly quiet day, but fun and I have felt refreshed and enlivened by the experience, even if it were rather a soggy one. Travelling home with Elaine was fun, she is a very lifegiving person and I was pleased to have her along for the ride. Not on my bike.

Today I saw a couple on a tandem with a trailer on the back with a dog in it. they should call those trailers 'tailers'. Did a nice run all along the beach from Weston pitch and putt to Netley Sailing club, then a small lap of the country park and then back again as the sun was setting over the water. i have a new gadget, well, its a head thing that you wear to keep your ears warm when you are skiing and I wore it for running. It is fine, apart from with my hair being short and curly, it sticks out on top and I look like a pineapple on a bad hair day. But my ears were happy, and I hate having cold ears, so that was a good thing. Played a bit of tennis today with Chrissie, a teacher from Berrywood who has a husband who is good at tennis, so he played R.

Last night we went to some strangers' house for a dialogue group dialoguing about how to dialogue. It was a hotch potch of people and very random, a bit like turning up for a murder mystery, they lived in a huge old house as well. There were 13 at the table, and not being superstitous that did not bother me at all. There were some interesting comments, like ' Do we communicate with language or would we also be communicating with vibrations?' It's a good question, none of us knew the answer, and R nudged me at that point as my face was clearly saying what I was thinking. I would be no good at poker.

Today we went to the big Vineyard and I had the opposite experience from the nuns day, when I calculated that I was the 20th oldest person there.