Chattering gulls

I was planning to blip the sunlit uplands of the Old Town, the St James Centre or Calton Hill, as we may not have a view of them for that much longer. We expect the works opposite to block that. But I was taken instead by a couple of chattering gulls down below the balcony, nicely lit by the evening light. It was slightly less cold this evening than it had been for most of the day.

A reasonably good day at the work interface. I had to grapple with a couple of excel spreadsheets in the morning, luckily doing nothing more strenuous than filling in some names. I literally cannot do anything with excel which doesn’t just involve typing letters and words into cells. I then had a zoom call with someone in Australia to discuss a potential collaboration, before I headed out to try and source the ingredients to make a Thai red curry paste. I got most of what I wanted in Waitrose, but not everything. For the record, it took 40 minutes from here to walk to Waitrose, which I was pretty pleased about. On the way back, I stopped at the small Dobbies and picked up a pot to hang on the balcony and a couple of little fuchsias. I then got the bus back from Stockbridge. I hope the fuchsias survive the rather inclement weather.

Soup and flatbreads for supper, and then I’ve been on a zoom call with the makers of this month’s gin subscription. A pleasant way of spending the evening. Before that, I was swapping some emails with a friend in another country. Rather alarmingly, having been fully vaccinated (although possibly less than three weeks after the second vaccine), both he, his wife and his mother-in-law caught Covid from their small child who brought it home from nursery, although all of them avoided serious illness. Whatever may be thought about it by some, a ‘vaccine passport’ would clearly be no such thing.