Q Day 9 - Sunday

Oh blessed (Sun) day, oh magnificent morning, oh glorious morning with the sun so right in a glorious season.

Dies solis (Latin), Sunnandæg (Old English) the day of the goddess Sunna.

About which The Velvet Underground (1967) sang ....

"Sunday morning, brings the dawn in

It's just a restless feeling by my side

Early dawning, Sunday morning

It's just the wasted years so close behind."

For me it's only in England or Ireland that I get the true feeling of Sunday. Asia doesn't really understand Sunday, except for poets like Rabindranath Tagore (maybe because Sunday, in India, is the day of the Hindu deity ‘Khandoba'). Tagore wrote…

"But when I awake at the end

Of Saturday night

I see the Sunday greet me

With a smile so bright."

In Siem Reap, Cambodia, various foreign owned eateries would close on Sundays, but everything else remained open. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, it would be very difficult to determine Sunday, except to say that it's two days away from Friday (prayer day). 

But oh what a privilege it is to be on an island off the Eastern British coast, in Summer, on a Sunday and feeling that remarkable Sunday feeling, now if only I wasn't in quarantine and allowed to savour the sun on its day..

It was Constantine I, (Rome's first Christian Emperor) who, in 321 AD, decreed that Sunday would be observed as the Roman day of rest. And, in answer to John Cleese's question in 'The Life of Brian' (1979) "What have the Romans ever done for us" you could say, well, Sunday.

Louis Macneice (1907 - 1963) gave us his Sunday Morning….

Down the road someone is practising scales,

The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,

Man's heart expands to tinker with his car

For this is Sunday morning, Fate's great bazaar;

Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,

On my Sunday morning, birds Twitter in the trees of various greens as the morning Summer sun illuminates a statuette,  partially hidden beneath a garden bush. Yes, it's all about the garden and its denizens, the beautiful blue of the sky and the peaceful still quiet of an English countryside day.