Rural industry

A quiet day - warm sun, but not hot; a breeze, but not too brisk (until later, when the rain was on the way); a walk, but not too far. In the middle of all this there was a brief out-of-the-ordinary half hour, as a dentist from Emergency Care rang to discuss my ongoing dental traumas and I ended up driving up to the local hospital to collect antibiotics from a nurse who rang me first to ascertain if I was outside and then reached across the space between the automatic doors to pass the box to me. Fingers crossed. Having had to abandon the zoom church service near the end, I logged on again from the car in time to say cheerio to people - it's a fairly surreal situation, isn't it?

This afternoon's walk up Glen Massan landed us at this bucolic scene - though I feel it would have been more bucolic had there been brown-armed young people making the hay into stooks and piling them around the field. Instead, we watched two tractors towing things - one rolling the hay into these amazing big bales, the other picking up the bales and twirling them briskly to wrap them tightly in black plastic. They were far enough away for their noise to be a distant hum, and it was a peaceful and soothing scene, though I can't think it was remotely soothing for the two men actually doing the job...

I think I've mentioned previously how much we're enjoying re-watching the whole run of Spooks on BBC iPlayer. Tonight's episode, the concluding part of a gripping three episodes, when the government was being subverted by a right-wing power grab funded by Russian money and the police were kettling a peaceful demonstration who were infiltrated by agents provocateurs - this episode was so alarmingly prescient and so convincing that when we turned to the BBC News at Ten it seemed oddly like a continuation of the story. 

So instead of going off to bed in a peacefully rustic idyll, I'm caught in a dystopian story where the UK is run by megalomaniacs bent on their own personal gratification and my own country faces threats to its hard-won autonomy ... Can't we bale out now, please?

Sorry - couldn't resist that last pun ...