Le premier coup ...

Today was one of unmitigated tail-chasing, a pursuit that ended only when I started walking up the road in the photo, of which more later. It began as usual, with the morning tea and the gnawing feeling that really I ought to get up as the morning I'd planned was at least an hour too short for all I hoped to do. (I'm poor at leaping straight out of bed, even when I have a plane to catch. Remember those days?) 

So: I put a loaf into the machine to be ready for lunch, ate breakfast, made green welly soup (very delicious - I added allspice, yellow mustard seeds, powdered coriander and powdered ginger to the veg from the bottom of the fridge), washed up the mess, made coffee, drank it. Then - and this is where the title comes in - I took myself off upstairs to cut my hair and colour it. This is something I did three times during the first lockdown; I've had two trips to my hairdresser since, but he's in Inverclyde which is a Level 3 restrictions authority and I'm in a Level 2 and we're not allowed to intermingle. My cut was still the great shape he'd done, but it was so long (ie about 1.5cm longer) that it was annoying me horribly. And that first cut is indeed* the most difficult - that moment when I wondered if I had actually had the nerve to use the clippers, the first section of hair held up with the offending 1.5cm sticking up waiting for the scissors ... Actually, it's not at all bad. My main grouse is that I was in a rush when it came to colouring it, and it didn't take properly on a couple of bits which are, to quote the packet, "colour-resistant" and need another 20 minutes.

Then - and this is why I was rushing - I had a last visit to the sports injury therapist about my foot. Home to finish off my lunch (another mug of tea and half a banana - really living it up) and out for this promised walk before it was dark. 

The photo shows the road between the farms in the Ardyne area, taken from the starting point. I usually go all the way to Knockdow, but today I only got as far as the dark clump of trees at the base of the rounded hill before I turned back. By then the sky was still quite pale, but the road was almost dark and I was wearing a dark green jacket and was pretty invisible and I didn't want to be run over. When I got back to the car, J told me he'd met a man in a van who'd stopped to tell him there was "a wee wumman" walking very quickly up the road ahead of him (he's still not going very quickly) and was she perhaps looking for him? He must have thought we were bonkers.

Tonight it's getting quite chilly and the moon is out: a brief respite before the next Atlantic depression sweeps in. Adding an extra of the last of the golden roses which I rescued as last night's wind and rain threatened to destroy it.

*"Le premier coup, c'est le plus difficile" is what #2 son, then aged 12, came out with at lunch with French friends when it was time to cut a large strawberry tart. It went down as his first French conversation ...