Stag party

I wonder how many of us have the kind of day that begins with nothing planned - just that feeling that this might be a day to Get Things Done - which then turns out to be an exercise in tail-chasing? Of course, sitting in bed with the morning cup of tea, putting off getting up by reading other people's blips isn't exactly an efficient start, so I didn't start early. I did however manage to speak to an actual person at RBGE about the story of the imminent closure of the café at Benmore Gardens - apparently there's some duff gen going around on this, but the people in the know, in Edinburgh, have been lamentably slow off the mark in doing anything to correct the misinformation. We shall see ...

After that I did a bit of singing, looking at possible communion hymns for the next few weeks, and parcelled up a copy of my book for a friend in Canada whose post-code I'm unable to decipher and can't send until I hear from her (Kathleen, if you're reading this ...).

The photo comes from the afternoon's walk in Glen Massan with my pal, Mr PB having decided to behave sensibly. We hiked very strenuously up an increasingly steep and muddy path recently created in preparation for forestry harvesting; it was so unrelenting that we had to salvage poles from the wood to preserve our knees on our descent. And all the way we were treated to the powerful bellowing of stags rutting on the hillside across the burn; their extraordinary noise followed us all the way, though we saw nothing. The hill in the photo is the one Mr PB and I climbed during lockdown - another knee-killing gradient. Our legs certainly knew we'd been climbing as we headed back down the road to the cars.

And two extra photos: one of the glorious colours of azaleas in the garden of a house that belongs to Emma Thomson, the actor, which we passed during our walk; the other of Mars, taken in my back garden, because I was told that it's brighter tonight than it will be for another 31 years and reckoned I'd better just have a good look now as I certainly won't be around for the next time. I was quite obsessed by Mars when I was a child, so this is a salute to my 7 year old self.

A delightful coda to my day came in the form of a message and then a FaceTime with my older granddaughter, who had to write a Hallowe'en poem for homework. She's a delight to work with on such things, having a wide-ranging vocabulary and a vivid imagination - and the wit to see why I suggest alterations. And at such moments, when I'm trying to cook fish at the same time as discussing the pros and cons of vers libre, I know I was in the right job for all these years ...