Another world

In several ways, I felt today was in another world from the grim wetness of the past few days. For a start, I suddenly realised as I was washing breakfast dishes (absurdly late - I'd been on the phone, and reading Tweets, and sharing online rage at the Westminster incompetents and charlatans) that it was not only not raining but that there were small scraps of blue sky and furthermore that there was a line of brightness to the south that promised quite other ...

In short, we headed south after coffee: back down to walk the shore of Loch Striven. Bear with me: it's a lovely stretch of road beside the blue water, and in the late morning bright sunshine it looks different from the same road at sunset. A heron was sitting on a mooring point near the Nato refuelling base; it flapped off after I'd taken its photo (did I sense irritability?). The seal we noticed on the shore almost a week ago is still there, though in a slightly different position and somewhat diminished - I think the sea is a marvellous purifier, if you get my point. It was warm - at 10ºC, with sun and no wind, I was so hot with walking that I had to take off my big puffa jacket and walk in my T shirt. 

But best of all today was the different light on Creag na Cailleach, the Stone of the Old Woman. As we passed, the sun was catching the lichen on the top of the stone where it stands in its strangely random, mossy hollow in the birch wood. Even on a bright midday, rather than a gloomy afternoon, it is an atmospheric place, filled with the spirits of those who farmed this land back when it was an isolated community and the land was all. 

As for the rest of the day, suffice it to say that right now I feel that lugging a tree into a house and sticking it up is one of the crazier activities of modern humanity. Especially when your tree is too heavy for your aged frame, and when, having manhandled it into position at severe risk to muscles and potential hernias, you leave it, stark and unadorned, looming in your sitting room. Perhaps tomorrow I may feel I have the energy to stick at least some lights on it, but for now it's as green and pagan as anything the druids might have thought up. 

And I'm away for a wee lie down ...