The morning after the night before, even the lark was not for getting up.

I, however, had an appointment at an unseasonably early hour. Church starts at 8:30am. And every Sunday, without fail, I shamble in and take a noisy place among the musicians at  8:32.

I arrive at 8:32 on the dot. I smile apologetically at my fellow musicians, I greet the Princesses and Al with rolling eyes and self-deprecating grins. Al shouts “Hello, Auntie Kate!” in a silent pause.

I don’t play in the first hymn because I am wrestling with music stands and super-size musician-weight hymnbooks which fall off their perches noisily at the quiet bits. It is always thus.

At  five past the start time, an alternative set of parishioners starts to stream through the doors. They, I hypothesise playfully, are coming to the 8:35 mass.

Well, now I feel virtuous. I beat the 8:35 massgoers by a whole three minutes.

I may be late, but you can set your clock by me. I am a constant, like that mathematical symbol which means the circumference of any given circle divided by its diameter, Pi. I do not vary.

That idea of a constant; it binds so many disciplines together. The mathematicians use it to define numbers like Pi: special numbers that arise naturally in the world of figures and formulae.

For the scientists it is a number measured, which stays the same for the same substance in the same conditions. And the wordsmiths simply say: something constant is not subject to variation.

So my garden was inconstant today, then.

Because today it had a visitor it has never had before, in weather to which it has traditionally been unaccustomed.

Phil  put his finger to his lips, as we cleared away after lunch, and gestured to the garden. There, emblazoned in the most glorious russet against the snow, was a little vixen.

She was tucking into a fat ball with gusto. She must have been very hungry, to venture in daylight into the exposed middle of the garden and stand, for maybe five minutes.

We called the children in theatrical whispers, and all crouched by the kitchen door, watching this little red spirit of the wild at a moment of content, in what must be a very spartan existence.

In her own good time, she slipped effortlessly over the fence, into the forest and away from us. Strange, after only five minutes of acquaintance, to feel so bereft.

The settled order of things was picked up and turned upside down by a little red quadruped.

But that settled order of things, of course, is not ever as settled as it might seem.

Take our sun. It is about halfway through its life as a yellow round supernova. It is made of about three-quarters hydrogen, and one-quarter helium, but this is an ever-changing set of proportions.

Because the sun is a magician: it changes hydrogen to helium, a great stellar conversion in which, so far, the sun has converted a hundred earth-masses of matter into pure energy.

The balance of the two gases will inevitably change. And when enough helium has been converted, in about five billion years, the sun will become much larger and much redder.  And all bets are off as to whether it swallows our little sphere: or whether a serendipitous stellar wind might have shrunk it enough to preserve us to quarrel another day.

Our sun, the writers would say, is inconstant.

Shakespeare has his little lovelorn lass, Juliet express mistrust in the constancy of  the cosmos. She has asked Romeo to swear his love faithfully, and he chooses the moon to swear by.

She exclaims: “O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb, lest that thy love prove likewise variable.”

It seems, when one puts it that way, that little about our place here on this planet is settled.

Even Narnian creation is inconstant. CS Lewis’ great lion, Aslan, creates a world as two young children watch. At the very beginning the sap of creation is so strong that trees grown in a matter of minutes.

The children have, by accident, brought the first seeds of evil with them into the new world. Jadis, a hard, cruel queen, has clawed her way out of her own world and been involved in a fracas worth reading in the streets of London. In the midst of the fray she wrenches off a bar of a lamp-post to use as a weapon.

In a hectic piece of time-and-space travel, she is transported to the new world and hurls the bar at the great golden lion. The sap of the new world gets to work on the bar; and before very long a sapling lamp-post is growing with all the speed of the trees around it.

The rate of growth in Narnia slows down to something approaching our own, of course. The lamp-post reaches maturity, whatever that is for a lamp post, and becomes surrounded by a dense wood and forgotten for Narnian centuries.

And the rest is another story.

My parents popped over for sausages and mash on Friday, and my father was brimming with googled news.

He had found research that suggests light is by no means as constant as it seems.

We have been measuring the speed of light for hundreds of years, starting way back with Dutch astronomer Olaf Roemer in the late 17th century.

Roemer gauged the speed of light by measuring the moons of Jupiter, first when they were close to us, and then when they were far away. But many varied methods have been used over the years.

And since the early 1930s, the speed of light has been understood to be unchanging: a constant around which our reality hurtles.

That is, until an Australian undergraduate called Barry Setterfield decided to compare all the measurements everyone else had made.

The results should all have clustered around 299,792 kilometres a second. But instead they showed that the older the observation, without exception, the faster the speed of light.

In short, even light is slowing down.

I suppose we could fret about all this inconstancy, this fickle natural world which runs orbits round us.

But in its purest sense, inconstancy is untamed and glorious: it uses other aliases, too, like change, and variety; but does not inconstancy express the grandest of scales?

For inconstancy concerns the underlying crescendos and decrescendos of life.

And like electrons hurtling round a nucleus: it binds us together, both with each other, and with our spellbinding planet.