Taking a balanced look ...

I fear I'm running short of sensible titles for blips these days - the sameness of much of the days doesn't help. However, I did begin the day by balancing - and stretching, and strengthening - in my online Pilates class, where I find standing on one foot for several minutes while waving the other leg about in an improbable fashion comes much more easily to me in my study than in the studio. Must be the lack of distraction ...

Once the class was done, we spent the rest of the morning in a FaceTime meeting with our family in Newhaven. The trigger for this socialising was my daughter-in-law's birthday; we were able to sit on the table while she unwrapped presents and watch while the four of them tucked into the most wonderful creation of a cake (their former nanny now has a business in cake-making and luscious afternoon-tea-carry-outs) and glasses of bubbly. Our coffee wasn't quite up to this, but it was lovely to be with them and to chat for so long that it was lunchtime by the time we said au devoir.

We walked by Loch Striven in the afternoon - a warm, still afternoon buzzing with bees and punctuated by the cries of oyster-catchers on the shore. We saw two herons in flight, harassed by a couple of gulls, and a pair of divers diving wonderfully offshore (birds, not chaps). We saw our first wild orchid of the summer (a deep purple one) among the dog roses, yellow flag iris, honeysuckle and cow parsley in great clumps like that in the foreground of this photo.

Despite all this beauty, and despite the heat, we were talking about the situation with the re-opening of schools. As former teachers we get incensed by people on chat shows talking about teachers sitting at home being paid, but we can also see that the various plans currently being drawn up are pretty well doomed before they get off the ground. And perhaps that was a balanced view as well.

At least the clouds massed threateningly to the north of us dissipated without any rain. Instead we had sun - and this lovely pale sky, photographed just before we headed for home.