Edinburgh

Inattention to matters financial meant I hadn't realized that using my mobile phone outside Australia involves quite some extra costs - including paying for incoming calls as well as outgoing ones!  Ah well.

I find Scotland snowbound but friendly; my contact here has treated me royally.

(And you get decent snacks like hot slices of black pudding in a soft bread roll!  I've yet to have haggis, though I've been taken numerous times already to Starbucks, and once to an Italian restaurant...)

Yesterday I rugged up and set off long before dawn to walk (very circumspectly) the frozen streets to Mass.  It must have been about a mile and half or more, and in this weather it took me over three-quarters of an hour - you can't stride out when in the snow you might go head over tails.  I arrived at the Orate fratres...

Later in the day, Mark and I heard another Mass, at the Jesuit church; Father had evidently mislaid his glasses, since he had difficulty reading the missal and got a bit mixed up.  But far more curious than this was the fact that, when I went to arise at the Orate fratres (as the latest command for the Novus Ordo is, as observed in Australia and in England and elsewhere), the congregation knelt instead, for the Preface and Sanctus and all, whereas back home we stand.  Similarly, no one stood for the Prayer after Communion and Blessing: no, they knelt right through to the dismissal.

I asked Mark afterward and he seemed surprised I was surprised: apparently this is just what one does at the Ordinary Form Mass here in Scotland.  (I don't object, just register this to-me-unknown "contrary custom".)

I see out the window that it's snowing again (it's dawn, about 9 am).

From the weather reports, I'm lucky to have come North when I did: all England is snowed under, with roads snarled and many unable to get to work or school.  Apparently it may be the coldest winter in thirty years...