Chance meetings

As this High Pressure weather continues, I find myself unable to setting to indoors activities ... and there was no Pilates class today; I'm hopeless at the self-motivation required to look out an old lesson and do it, so out I went. Only to the chemist, to pick up prescriptions - I feel it's a marker of The Elderly to have big bags to collect regularly, but there you go. Hung out a washing (we're cleaner when it's good drying weather), braised some red cabbage (which, I confess, I'm beginning to regret, though it was jolly good), did some Italian, and was phoned at length by our tenor.

We did, however, get out properly in the afternoon, taking the winding road to Ardentinny and climbing up the hill behind the beach there - site, if you're interested, of the de facto campsite which is ruining the beach that was such an important part of our summers when the boys were wee. Once we left the village area, we saw not a soul; it was completely silent except for the birds and we walked on, going rather further along the track than we'd intended. This is another walk made possible by forestry, but currently less pleasant (though more open) because of harvesting operations and the necessary strengthening of the track. However, we ignored the road surface (other than to avoid falling on a nose) and the Passchendaele-like destruction of the trees and concentrated on the views. For they are truly spectacular up here, with the blue of sea and sky and the sun striking off the silver birch trunks closest to the road. I've blipped the view down the Firth of Clyde from the high point above the beach.

Back down, and skirting the shore on a little track back to the village, we caught up with a woman walking her dog - a little pug-like dog on bandy legs who purred instead of making doggy noises. We got round to discussing people we'd known from the village over the years, and I told her I'd met a girl in the maternity ward of the local hospital who lived in Ardentinny. She stared at me: "that's me" she said. It was all rather emotional - I can remember so vividly my week in hospital 43 years ago, the circumstances of that fleeting but very real brief friendship, but had never thought of her staying here after the baby was born. Another dog appeared, towing a friend from our choir, also local. After months of lockdown such meetings achieve a glowing status - and I imagine that's what everyone's doing in the pubs today as lockdown (in England) begins to weaken.

Thank you all for your comments on yesterday's post - once again I am so tired youse will all have to wait till tomorrow!