Getting to be a habit ...

In all sorts of little ways, habits form. Monday began with the pang of realisation that we'd slept slightly longer than intended, so I sat drinking my morning tea in the grey pre-sunrise rather than darkness and was subsequently rushed getting out to Pilates. The class isn't early - 10.30am used to be morning interval time when I was teaching! - but I seem to be less and less capable of doing mornings. Perhaps it's because I sit up late blipping ...

The class was strenuous but good, and all the more enjoyable for consisting only of the hard-core group who have stuck with this class for 3 years now: we laugh in undisciplined outbreaks of mirth that would be disapproved of in other Pilates classes. And then coffee (back home - I'm making some lovely Christmas coffee just now and really look forward to it) swiftly followed by some lunch because the sunshine was beckoning. (Smushed up avocado and cherry tomatoes with a slurp of Daddy Cool green hot sauce, since you ask, with homemade brown toast and a banana to follow).

And this is where the other habit comes in: we headed back down the road to the south, where the sun shone as we walked along the shore of Loch Striven as far as Inverchaolain Schoolhouse, setting behind the hills just as we turned back. I could have blipped a photo of a bloated dead seal that I spotted lying in the shallows of the high tide - at first I thought it was a rock, then a tree-trunk, until I saw the flipper ... and the eyes ... but with so much beauty to look at I thought not. (Of course not: I wouldn't dream of putting it here)

My blip, then, is of the two mooring platforms that lie beyond the pier at the Nato refuelling point on the loch side. Often they have rows of cormorants/shags sitting on them, but at this late hour they were vacant. Beyond them, one of two ships is heading briskly for the open channel from the fish farm on the other side of the loch, and beyond that the fiery sky from the sunset, a colour that would deepen before it vanished. The darker bulk is the island of Bute, again, and beyond that the outline of the Arran hills. We took so many photos I didn't know which to choose, so I'm going to use one of my two remaining extras to post a slightly arty one of a roadside burn cascading down into a ditch. I loved the drips down the right of the waterfall ...

And now it's midnight and the owl in the clock is telling me to go to bed. I was tired forty minutes ago - but not now!