Shining a light

Suddenly Argyll is so much milder - I realised when we were out this afternoon that the temperature was a whole ten celsius degrees warmer than it had been on Saturday afternoon, when our entire walk was taken in a temperature of -1ºC. However, first thing this morning I was finding it hard to convince myself of the relative balminess, as neither I nor Himself was feeling particularly brilliant. 

Because of a conversation quite early on in a post on this platform, I can't resist the awareness that these daily updates during a pandemic might form a rich source for sociological digging in the future - in much the same way that letters from the Front or stories of the flu pandemic of 1918-20 are to our time. So rather than merely nattering on about what was in fact a pretty tedious day enlivened mainly by irritation and bickering, I thought I'd say this: Today, five days since I had my first dose of the Astra-Zeneca vaccination, I felt disappointingly terrible in the morning. I was determined to do my Pilates class at 10am, having decided that stretching the muscle into which the needle had sunk would alleviate the pain there, but when it came to the bit, I was actually only able to do the stretching and balancing work and very little strength work at all. Apart from tiredness, there was a distance feeling of nausea, which didn't sit too well with bending over to touch the ground.... Anyway, I finished the lesson as far as I felt able, and went for a sit down before making some coffee. Lunchtime found me still sitting - and indifferent as to whether I felt like lunch at all. 

Some bread and tomatoes later, along with an Omeprazole, rendered me just about up to a walk along the shore road at Toward, which is where I took this photo, the only one I've taken all day. In the middle of the photo is Rothesay, on the Island of Bute, and towards the left hand side of the sky you can just make out a couple of seagulls tossing about in the wind. Normally a walk makes me feel better, but today I was merely tired. So tired, in fact, that when I tried to do some Italian before dinner I found myself drooping in sleep over the computer ...

All this meant I didn't accomplish all I hoped to today; I'm very, very familiar with the two poems I've chosen for tomorrow's workshop but have found no time to sit down with a print-out and annotate it for myself. I'm not even contemplating it now - the yawns are winning!

But all this reaction to the vaccine - it does show that something's happening, does it not? 

Vigorously.