Driven

Today began with overtones of a B movie I seem to recall seeing in black and white, which might have been called, imaginatively, The Fog - a great bank of it lurked on the far side of the Firth when I woke, and as the sun rose the fog, now pale white, moved closer to our side, infiltrating the Holy Loch to the north and creeping along the east bay towards our house ... I'll choose one of the photos I took of it as an extra.

Church at Home again today - a lovely service, though I despair when I play back the video on YouTube and realise how poorly the music survives all its journey through different computer systems. (I know that's not the point, but it's our bit!) Coffee with chat followed, and the subsequent urgent decision to be made: do we have lunch and then go out, or go out at noon and eat late? I realised at this point that we're both becoming ruled by our need to walk, to the extent that we're missing out on either a decent lunch (because at 3pm it seems crazy when dinner will not be far off) or the best of the day. Today we chose food first. For the first time in 50 years of married life I grilled a couple of kippers, which we ate with hot buttered home-made sourdough toast and both managed to dissect without too much carnage. (I can so recommend Inverawe Smokehouse!)

We were out by 2pm, driving south into the bright sun with wisps of fog releasing us as we left Dunoon and finding the walk over the farm road at Ardyne beautifully quiet - so much so that we walked right past Knockdow, where we usually turn, and continuing down to the loch side. My photo shows the road as we turned to come home, with the waxing moon over the trees in the blue sky - we walk as far as the foot of the hills in front, where the road turns right and continues as far as the right of the photo and beyond. It was a glorious and largely ice-free walk, though my hips were feeling victims of RSI after so much road walking.

Big rush when I got in to deal with two phone calls and three Italian exercises around the business of cooking dinner; I've spent the rest of the evening semi-comatose. I couldn't resist watching the last of the programmes about Trump that treats him as a show - some of the footage was new to me and rendered even more horrifying by the satirical use of background music. 

My title refers to the fact that every day now seems to have the same compulsions, driving me to accomplish so many little things before evening. Is this senility, or the effects of lockdown?