Up a golden tunnel ...

...Into the mist and drizzle of the Bishop's Glen. An apt metaphor, I think, for the life we lead here - quite apart from the fact that before the Rector of Holy Trinity Dunoon became the Bishop of Brechin this was the road he took every time he walked his dog, so that once again it really was the Bishop's glen!

But I was trying earlier today to convey by the dubious method of a Facebook conversation the knowledge that although Argyll is indeed breathtakingly beautiful, it isn't a particularly easy place to love when the clocks change and the Atlantic fronts chase one another across Scotland, beginning with us. I appreciated the beauty of these mature, russet trees and the carpet of beech leaves (I'm sure they're beech leaves) on the track - but even as I took the photo, the rain came on again in the way it just doesn't further east. Anyone, for example, taking on the job that our second-latest bishop has vacated, will be happiest if they like walking on country tracks, feeling the rain in their hair, enjoying the fact that the air is unpolluted ...

Later we passed a woman I know slightly, a slim woman of about my own age, a slim woman marching, dogless but determined, up the hill we were descending. 

I bet she has a FitBit.