Too Clever by Half

Sometimes I can be too efficient for my own good and on this occasion, booking in May, hotels in the autumn on the basis of ferry timetables for the summer months, I have been bitten on the bum well and truly and it hurts.

His Lordship and I ( but more probably I) decided that to get to France easily without going through London or Portsmouth, it would be interesting to fly to Jersey and get the ferry to St Malo. So far so good. The hotels were booked on both sides of the channel on the basis of the ferry timetables at hand, but I couldn't book online far enough ahead for the Condor Ferries. That fact should have rung warning bells, but I didn't hear them.
Today of course I discovered that the ferries don't run every day later in the year and so I have had to jiggle the hotel bookings and lose out on one night's prepaid bill. One is never to old to learn a lesson and have to pay dearly for being too quick on the draw.

With all this palaver, the only blip I took today (which has absolutely no relevance to the matter in hand), is of the group of ceramics we brought back from Stromness a fortnight ago.
To me they resemble ladies in burkas although I also think of them as 'shawled Marys' which I have coined from George Mackay Brown's description of daffodils in bud.