Getting away from the present

Enough of quiet beauty and glorious sunsets - the weather changed overnight and left us with a dreary morning and a slightly brighter afternoon with only a hint of drizzle on the air. It was also strangely chilly despite a rise in temperature - the wind makes a difference. Had to go for another blood-letting in the morning; I hate these repeated tests when you're not really sure why they're doing them. At least I could hand in a week's worth of respectable blood pressure readings.

Coffee gave me the energy to do some more online present-buying and make a couple of phone calls and do some Italian before it was necessary to eat something and get out before it became dark. My pal was in town for some shopping, so we met at the end of my lane and headed into the hills behind the town. When we first moved to Dunoon, almost 47 years ago, I used to stand at the window of my council house in Ardenslate and look up at the hill known as the Camel's Hump. On the hillside nearby there appeared to be a mechanical digger, but because of my ignorance of the area and the fact that with a five-week old baby (I know: we were mad to move then) I was kind of restricted in my exploration of the area I hadn't a clue why it was there.

Later I realised it was part of the Forestry operations beginning on that hillside: a road was being created and trees planted. In time, these trees have grown up and now they're being harvested. I had thought today that we could walk north and out to the end of the road, but stern notices warned us not to because of "forest operations" and we chose a lower road. And then we saw the wee muddy path up the hillside ... and followed it. It led to the Camel's Hump, now confusingly hidden by trees. It was lethally muddy - the kind of path you can get up all right but tend to break bits of yourself coming down. We pressed on, in the hope that we could leave the summit by another path.

All I can say about that is that we could. It was even steeper, but less muddy. It was the path I used to bring my boys up when they were old enough to scramble. We found ourselves heading back along the road we had originally intended taking. There were no forbidding notices. We came to the first dodgy place, where a man in a big Thing was lifting logs four at a time from a trailer and lowering them to a woodpile in the ditch. We stopped. It was clearly not safe to pass in case he dropped the trees on us. And then he waved. He stopped what he was doing and waved us through, with nary a cross word. We waved back, we smiled, we blew kisses. And ploughtered on, past the more distantly alarming sight of tall trees toppling to the ground, and back down to the town.

So, unusually, a blip of me at the trig point on the Dunan, aka the Camel's Hump, with the view of the Firth of Clyde behind me, where it turns east towards Glasgow. I'm rather red in the face, but cheerful. And that's A Good Thing.