Socialising!

On this increasingly chilly day - there are sleet showers in tomorrow's forecast - I branched out and went out for coffee with someone I met on the front the other day after not really seeing each other for years. The first time we'd spoken must have been about 35 years ago when one of her daughters was in my form class; since then our paths have crossed and uncrossed and so made for interestingly random chat. The fascinating thing for me was the number of people in The Boat House whom I knew - the place was busy when we arrived, but I offset my twinge of anxiety with the realisation that most of the customers were my age, and had perhaps been careful ...

This sudden outburst of sociability led me to wonder why we so seldom go out for coffee in Dunoon. Perhaps it's tied to the fact that we live so close to all the convenient venues - it took me ten minutes to walk here - that it's just as easy to have it at home. It also takes less time - because I'm hardly aware of time hanging heavy, for reasons I keep harping on about on here. And it could be that I actually prefer the coffee I make to anything I ever drink elsewhere, though today's double espresso was in fact jolly good. But it was reassuringly jolly to pass tables and see known faces smiling, or hailing me, or waving across the room, and I felt that perhaps I was still in the land of the living after all ...

I've made a composite of the two photos I took: one of the exterior of the Boat House, which used to be The Yachtsman, which used to be the Cosy Corner ... and of the view from its outside tables, at which it was too cold and too liable to be suddenly soaked to sit. I thought my more urban fellow-Blippers and coffee-house-frequenters might be amused at the lack of people in both, at the vista down the Firth of Clyde towards the Cumbraes and Ayrshire - though you can make out part of the pier structure along the prom from the coffee shop. 

Busy it ain't!