Not quite as forecast ...

When I looked at my weather app yesterday it suggested wall-to-wall sunshine for us today, and I was all set to wash all the towels and get them outside. However, when I got round to looking out the window, all I could see was a low fog enveloping all the hills and laying its clammy dampness on everything it touched. So the towels remained unwashed and I revised my plans.

I did actually achieve something this morning. When we came home from our week in Arran last September, I washed and ironed and put away ... and shortly afterwards I changed the sheets on our bed and left the white cotton pillowslips that need proper ironing sitting on the ironing board. The ironing board, in turn, was erected in the back bedroom. To get to the window you had to squeeze between ironing board and the end of the bed. And in that little space we left two rucksacks, one his, the other mine. 

If I tell you that all these things, including the clean-but-crumpled pillowslips, have been lying in the back bedroom ever since the last week in September, you will probably be thinking "slut" (realistic) or "Poor thing - she's lost it" (charitable). I think the truth probably lies in a  mixture of the two. My tidying in there really depends on our having a wee turnover of visitors for whom the bedroom needs to be half decent. But this was indeed getting past a joke, and today I dealt with it. I ironed the pillowslips with care and put them away. I put the iron away (after it was cool). I threw out some bags that had brought Christmas presents (I know - two months...). I put the rucksacks on the high top shelf of the wardrobe. I felt I'd achieved something at last.

Fired by this I took an hour to write some more memories of a child in post-war Glasgow, reliving the suicidal games we played and the intense freedom of the streets and surroundings. If there are sufficient pages in the finished article, I might just go for publication. I've plenty of photographs to add, though perhaps not of one of  our death-defying street games. Writing helps to stave off the emptiness of our lives just now; I populate my memory with long-vanished children and a pigtailed me on an orange fairy cycle.

We walked at Toward later. The mist was still damp, like being on a mountain-top, and the air quite chilly in its clamminess. There were hardly any people out, and mercifully few dogs. We actually met someone with three spaniels who responded to her every whistle and paid us no heed at all because she told them not to. Two of them were gun dogs, and clearly used to obeying her. After she'd gone, it grew eerily quiet, the silence broken only by the odd burbling of some oyster-catchers on the beach. The beach has changed again with the winter storms, and all the sand appears to have been sucked out onto the low tide sandbanks where the birds cluster, leaving the rest of the beach a litter of rocks and dead trees.

Blipping a Ken Lochhead moment - two red jackets for the price of one, and a clutch of dogs enjoying the low tide.