Five a side football, buttered toast and old poetry

Last night was one of those strange juxtapositions of experience the oddity of which isn't obvious till you think backwards.

9.00 to 10.00 was five a side football, requiring someone my age to have a sufficient sense of recklessness, to resurrect whatever skills I ever had, and balance these with a sensible consideration of what is still possible. Got flattened near the start and was playing catch up with my dignity for the rest of the game!

10-10.20 drove back listening to the CD of the month for me – Renaissance, Harry Christoper and the Sixteen, and listened yet again to Allegri's Miserere and felt that was Vespers and Compline sorted for the night.

10.20 to 11.00 a cooling shower, tea and buttered toast, and some time browsing in Karl Barth IV.3.2 chasing a paragraph I'd read earlier but hadn't marked and wanted to post on this blog – still haven't found it.

11.00 till 11.25 reading poetry while having a bottle of water and came across a poem by Robert Herrick that I'd all but forgotten but which used to be a favourite – an entire blog post could be dedicated to what that means 'used to be a favourite. Anyway here's the poem I read just before lights out – the quaint olde worlde spelling and erratic punctuation is found in a late Victorian anthology of devotional poems, bound in green leather which I picked up for 80p years ago.

GOD'S MERCY

Gods boundless mercy is, to sinfull man,

Like to the ever wealthy ocean:

Which though it sends out thousand streams, 'tis n'ere

Known, or els seen to be the emptier:

And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more

Full, and filed full, then when full-fild before.

Does anyone still read Robert Herrick?

The photo is of the North Sea from Aberdeen front – not quite the ever wealthy ocean of God's mercy, – too cold for that!