Pink Sunday

It was lovely to find myself in the choir stalls at the back of church again. Naturally I do not really belong in the stalls, not being in the minute choir, but the choristers stick to the right side, leaving the left side free for interlopers. And as the choir stalls are slightly raised, there is a view of the congregation from there. I have always liked to look at the congregation,

It was Laetare Sunday, so rose vestments were the order of the day, although the only actually pink thing I remember at Mass was our priest's stole. Such cheerful things as liturgical colours were driven from my mind by the news from the pulpit that one of the tea ladies had been hit by a double-decker bus and was lying very badly injured in hospital. It is a terrible thing to have happened to a very sweet old lady who is not only a pillar of the TLM community but a tireless campaigner for noble causes.

When I got back to the Historical Tenement I looked up "pensioner" "hit by bus" and "Edinburgh" on the internet and discovered that this was not a unique occurrence. I swiftly found news stories about two other pensioners and a heavily pregnant woman who were also hit by Edinburgh busses recently.

After Benedict Ambrose had a nap, we went back out into the city and got on one of its lethal busses towards Portobello. Our destination was a Laetare Sunday supper, and according to tradition, all the food was pink.  In the sitting-room, we had pink lemonade-and-gin cocktails with slices of delicious Serrano ham and "ham"-flavoured crisps. Then dinner began with pink soup (beetroot, cream and red onion), followed by boiled pork and pink potatoes and then raspberry fool and "Cherry Lambrini."

The "Cherry Lambrini" is a Pink Sunday joke, really. It tastes a lot like cherry Kool-aid, and a teenager could drink a bottle of it quite innocently and not understand afterwards how she got so drunk. For once I was a bit sad I have (mostly) weened myself from sugar because otherwise Cherry Lambrini would be a wonderful drink. If I were still interested in clubbing (and could still drink sweet things), that is what I would drink before a night on the tiles.

Cherry Lambrini seems to have made me quite nostalgic for my youth--or some imagined youth that featured Cherry Lambrini instead of Mike's Hard Lemonade, a rather disgusting Canadian concoction that fuelled my dance floor exuberance when I was in my late twenties.

The entertainment during supper, besides our own highly amusing company, was youtube videos of processions and masses in Spain, and also Dudley Moore's splendid spoof on Benjamin Britten's folk song arrangements:

This last was thanks to my brother Nulli's and our friend Red Mezzo's concert in rural Quebec when my mum and I were there a week-and-a-half ago. I mentioned their programme in the hopes of eliciting a musical conversation I might actually understand, and said that I didn't like Britten's folk song arrangements, which opinion did not enrage my hearers although they clearly thought his folk song arrangements are fine. What got them agitated was my statement that Widor's "Toccata in F" is secular and was written not for a Mass but for concerts, which is just about the only thing about music I actually know.