The house is full of boxes and dust, the cat is unhinged, the removals firm arrives tomorrow and will load up and start for Orkney. Our worldly goods will be put in containers, shipped to the island and craned off onto a trailer and the tractor will take it all from the pier to the manse. But not until 18th September.


The funeral in Norwich was inspiring and emotional. There are strange events around a death, a disturbance and expansion in the air, a sense of the person's presence, essence, vividly there, the corpse a caricature in clay. I wonder whether these strong feelings are the 'intimations' which lead to talk of transcendence, the conditions under which such language forms and develops and then it all closes in again, nothing to touch or reach towards but an intangible impression, something on the periphery, not to be seen directly but out of the corner of the eye, something shimmers and disappears. If there is a certitude of things unseen, then it is a certitude of ... no more than this, and it can barely be spoken about and certainly not proclaimed, as an ideology, by 'people of faith'. Instead, only listening.